Inter-Vehicular Communication - From Edge Support to Vulnerable Road Users

Motivation

Looking back at the last decade, one can observe enormous progress in the domain of vehicular networking. In this growing community, many ongoing activities focus on the design of communication protocols to support safety applications, intelligent navigation, multi-player gaming and others. Using the terms Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC), Car-2-X (C2X), or Vehicle-2-X (V2X), many applications – as interesting as challenging – have been envisioned and (at least) partially realized. Very large projects have been initiated to validate the theoretic work in field tests and protocols are being standardized. With the increasing interest from industry, security and privacy have also become crucial aspects in the stage of protocol design in order to support a smooth and carefully planned roll-out. We are now entering an era that might change the game in road traffic management. Many car makers already supply their recent brands with cellular and WiFi modems, some also adding vehicular WLAN (DSRC, ITS-G5) and C-V2X technologies.

We initiated the “Inter-Vehicular Communication” Dagstuhl Series back in 2010, when a first Dagstuhl Seminar was organized on this topic. The motivation was to bring together experts in this field to investigate the state of the art and to highlight where sufficient solutions already existed. The main outcome of this very inspiring seminar series was that there are indeed areas within this research field where scientific findings are being consolidated and adopted by industry. This was the consensus of quite intriguing discussions among participants from both industry and academia. Yet, even more aspects have been identified where substantial research is still needed. Seminars in this series focused on general vehicular communication technologies, security and safety impact, cooperative driving concepts and its implications on communication protocol design, and many more. Some of the findings of the first three seminars in this series have been published not only in the related Dagstuhl Reports but also in widely visible magazine articles [1, 2, 3].

We now intend to shift the focus with this seminar from basic networking principles to open challenges in edge computing support and, as a novel aspect, on how to integrate so called vulnerable road users (VRU) into the picture. Edge computing is currently becoming one of the core building blocks of cellular networks, including 5G, and it is necessary to study how to integrate ICT components of moving systems. The trade-offs of computation distribution, system aspects, and the impact on end-to-end latency are still unanswered. Also, vehicular networking and cooperative driving focuses almost exclusively on cars but leaves out communication and coordination with, for example, pedestrians and bicyclists. For example, many of the existing communication solutions for this scenario were designed without having battery constraints in mind. In the meantime, some early research has been initiated on this topic, we organized a workshop at INFORMATIK 2019 on VRUs and initial projects report very interesting results on safety features for VRUs. Building upon the great success of the first two seminars, with this follow-up seminar, we aim to again bring together experts from all these fields from both academia and industry.

1. Falko Dressler, Frank Kargl, Jörg Ott, Ozan K. Tonguz and Lars Wischhof, "Research Challenges in Inter-Vehicular Communication - Lessons of the 2010 Dagstuhl Seminar," IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 49 (5), pp. 158-164, May 2011.
2. Falko Dressler, Hannes Hartenstein, Onur Altintas and Ozan K. Tonguz, "Inter-Vehicle Communication - Quo Vadis," IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 52 (6), pp. 170-177, June 2014.
3. Onur Altintas, Suman Banerjee, Falko Dressler and Geert Heijenk, "Executive Summary - Inter-Vehicular Communication Towards Cooperative Driving," Proceedings of Dagstuhl Seminar 18202 on Inter-Vehicular Communication - Towards Cooperative Driving, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, May 2018, pp. 31–59.