Vehicular grid communications: the role of the internet infrastructure

Vehicle communications are becoming a reality, driven by navigation safety requirements and by the investments of car manufacturers and Public Transport Authorities. As a consequence many of the essential vehicle grid components (radios, Access Points, spectrum, standards, etc.) will soon be in place (and paid for) paving the way to unlimited opportunities for other car-to-car applications beyond safe navigation, for example, from news to entertainment, mobile network games and civic defense. In this study, we take a visionary look at these future applications, the emerging "Vehicular Grid" that will support them and the interplay between the grid and the communications infrastructure. In essence, the Vehicular Grid is a large scale ad hoc network. However, an important feature of the Vehicular Grid, which sets it apart from most instantly-deployed ad hoc networks, is the ubiquitous presence of the infrastructure (and the opportunity to use it). While the Vehicular Grid must be entirely self-supporting for emergency operations (natural disaster, terrorist attack, etc), it should exploit the infrastructure (when present) during normal operations. In this paper we address the interaction between vehicles and Internet servers through Virtual Grid and Internet Infrastructure. This includes transparent geo-route provisioning across the Internet, mobile resource monitoring, and mobility management (using back up services in case of infrastructure failure). We then focus on routing and show the importance of Infrastructure cooperation and feedback for efficient, congestion free routing.