Using Road Side Units as Delegates for accessing and delivering data to users anywhere in the VANET

Vehicular ad hoc networks, also known as VANETs, enable vehicles which are not necessarily within the same radio transmission range to communicate with each other and with fixed Roadside Units (RSUs). RSUs allow for the development of cooperative and distributed applications that enable vehicles and RSUs to work together in order to share and process several types of information, and possibly coordinate actions. Systems have been proposed to utilize RSUs as information disseminators, security providers, and service directories. This presentation describes ongoing research that aims to exploit the role of the system of RSUs to bring the data to the VANET user in an effortless and convenient way. This endeavor involves two research tracks: 1) using RSUs as delegates on behalf of the VANET users to acquire data from providers without the users directly connecting to them, and 2) also utilizing the RSUs to aid in routing packets in the VANET between far away vehicles. Related to the first track, some of the providers may require authentication. For this, the system implements a method for allowing RSUs to use users’ credentials for fetching the desired data without jeopardizing their privacy. On the other hand, the second track gives the RSUs an active role in a proposed geographic-based routing scheme to deliver data packets to vehicles anywhere in the VANET. Experiments using the ns2 simulation software reveal promising results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the overall system.
Hassan Artail is a Professor at the American University of Beirut (AUB) where he is doing research in distributed systems and mobile computing. During the past seven years, Dr. Artail has published over 85 papers in top conferences and reputable journals. He obtained his BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering with high distinction from the University of Detroit in 1985 and 1986, and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Wayne State University in 1999. Before joining AUB in October 2001, Dr. Artail was a system development supervisor at the Scientific Labs of Chrysler/DaimlerChrysler, where he worked for 11 years in the field of system development for vehicle testing applications. He is a senior IEEE member.