Research Intern at University of Victoria,Canada : Writeup

Over 600 million passenger cars travel on the streets and roads around the world today.The average time spent by a person driving or riding is 2 hours and 52 minutes per day.The rate of growth of the passenger car population is projected between 3–6 percent in the coming years. All these statistics intensified the need for the development of Vehicular Networks, a means of communication and information sharing between the vehicles on the move.

When calculated, the significance of the data that can be gathered while a person is on the move is quite astonishing. And the effect of sharing this amount of data among the other vehicles around is mind blowing! The tides created by these effects push us towards the shore of inter-vehicular communications.

The very thought of sharing information on the move opens the door to a large pool of applications based on safety and business needs. You want to escape a traffic jam? You want to enjoy high-speed Internet on the move? You want to find a parking space just like that? If these questions erupt butterflies within your stomach then I have something to feed those butterflies. Those days are not far away! Let us examine different kinds of applications that arise from the roots of Vehicular Networks first.

One fine day, I am going on a highway and all of the sudden a car on opposite lane looses control and overturns. It would be helpful if I could call an ambulance while I concentrate on driving. It would be even better if I could tell the other vehicles to slow down in order to avoid a pile-up crash. This particular case gives rise to emergency message dissemination
applications.

Another fine day, I am going by car to airport in order to catch a flight for Toronto. But due to the heavy traffic it seems that I would likely miss my scheduled flight. It would be great if I was able to reschedule my trip by connecting to the Internet on the move. It would be very helpful if I get to know the density of the traffic along each possible route to my destination, so that we can choose the best path. This scenario leads to the category of smart traveler services and traffic information services.

Now having a clear idea of the scope and the diverse range of applications that branch out of Vehicular Networks, let us move onto some other important aspects of this promising field of sciences and engineering. Vehiclular Netowrks are rapidly dynamic in nature.

Hence we bring them under the ad-hoc class and label them as “Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks”—VANETS.

With the safety and comfort comes a cost! Yes, VANETS would require great expenditures if implemented as an independent infrastructure. But the existing Internet infrastructure can be very well used to overlay the infrastructure needed for VANETS. Scientists and engineers have continuously toiled to reduce the infrastructure requirements so as to minimize the time and cost required to realize the technology. This has been one of the prime research focuses of Dr. Jianping Pan and his vehicular networks group at the Protocols for Advanced networking Lab (PANLAB), University of Victoria (UVIC), and the research community has made significant contributions in the past few years towards the VANET technology. I have been a part of the vehicular networks group during my MITACS GLOBALINK’10 internship at UVIC and created simulations of real world scenarios to analyze the protocols developed at the laboratory. It would help in better understanding the performance of the protocol and modeling it more accurately, suited to the real world scenarios. Simualtions help protocol designers and researchers by providing different situations due to the variations in traffic load and condition and several other factors while the protocol is being simulated and evaluated.

During my technical presentation session

In an attempt to use the existing infrastructure, we preferred connecting several VANETS at different places to propogate information using wired access points infrastructure. My project involves the analysis of the availability of an access point for vehicles to upload their information. It includes the estimation of parameters such as wireless transmission probability and communication collision probability. This study would result in the complete analysis of positioning and distribution of access points across a region. This would be vital in determining the infrastructure cost and ease the cost-benefit analysis.

MITACS has played a vital role in my research by bringing me to the right place for doing the research in my field of interest with experienced researchers and professors of the field. Added to that they have exposed us to valuable experiences during the industrial engagement week and also created the awareness on the various oppurtunities that are open in this land of enormous oppurtunities. Above all, the nature, beauty, weather and stunning scenery that Canada has offered to us deserve special mention.

With Sue and Megan 🙂