About efficiency in wireless communication frameworks on vehicular networks

Nowadays, the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) attract many attentions. ITS applications would indeed increase the road safety and the transport efficiency, limit the impact of the vehicles on the environment, improve the overall productivity... However, several important open issues have to be solved before. Among them, the software architecture represents a key issue. Indeed, most of the ITS applications will rely on a distributed frameworks embedded in the vehicles. These applications often require robustness, quality of services or real time management, while the vehicular networks present important constraints in terms of dynamic, variable density, communication reliability, communication duration... In this paper, we discuss the requirements of the software architectures for ITS applications. Next we propose an efficient architecture for distributed applications over vehicular networks, called Airplug. This architecture has been implemented in a light embedded framework, and has been used to test distributed services and protocols on the road. We then show that such a light and efficient architecture is well adapted to build distributed applications on vehicular networks.