Heterogeneous Wireless Communications for Vehicular Networks

This chapter introduces and motivates the need for communication vehicular networks (VNs) for infomobility services (Section 4.1), describes main wireless communications technologies enabling (VNs) (Section 4.2), discusses how to evaluate their performance in realistic scenarios (Section 4.3), and presents some case studies (Section 4.4). Results in case studies provide insights on how heterogeneous wireless networks (HWNs) can be exploited in the presence of user mobility and various traffic conditions and how the network will be loaded when several vehicles are sharing information for infomobility, security, and entertainment services. Note that, typically, technologies we are going to describe and discuss have not initially been designed for infomobility applications, thus their performance and behavior are not easily predictable in the new envisioned vehicular scenarios and have to be carefully evaluated.