Sensor Communications towards Intelligent Vehicle Networking

Sensor technologies have been widely used to make transportation clean, efficient, connected, and safe. Roadside wireless sensor and networking technology represents a costeffective solution and can leverage the deployment of the system as a whole. Sensors installed in cars continuously gather important information, such as air bags, distance detection, mechanical and electronic parts, tire pressure, collision force, and passengers’ conditions. Transmission of such information between cars can be used to implement differentiated mobile services. As a consequence, Wireless Vehicular Sensor Network (VSN) has been widely accepted in developing the next generation intelligent transportation application systems as well as connected vehicles networking. However, VSN does not operate like the traditional wireless sensor network (WSN). For example, the motion of the vehicle, the environment of the roads, and other uncertain traffic conditions all pose challenges to the system. For safety reason, the vehicle-vehicle and vehicle-gateway communication modes must be stable. Therefore, how to keep link stability becomes an important issue. This special issue is in response to the increasing convergence of distributed sensor networks. Papers selected for this special issue represent recent progresses in the field, including works on mobility architectures, vehicle communications and networking, algorithms in wireless sensor networks, and services and applications in distributed systems. All of these papers not only provide novel ideas and state-of-the-art techniques in the field but also stimulate future research in the sustainable environment. 2. Architecture and Mobility