A survey of urban vehicular sensing platforms

Vehicular sensing where vehicles on the road continuously gather, process, and share location-relevant sensor data (e.g., road condition, traffic flow) is emerging as a new network paradigm for sensor information sharing in urban environments. Recently, smartphones have also received a lot of attention for their potential as portable vehicular urban sensing platforms, as they are equipped with a variety of environment and motion sensors (e.g., audio/video, accelerometer, and GPS) and multiple wireless interfaces (e.g., WiFi, Bluetooth and 2/3G). The ability to take a smartphone on board a vehicle and to complement the sensors of the latter with advanced smartphone capabilities is of immense interest to the industry. In this paper we survey recent vehicular sensor network developments and identify new trends. In particular we review the way sensor information is collected, stored and harvested using inter-vehicular communications (e.g., mobility-assist mobility-assisted dissemination and geographic storage), as well using the infrastructure (e.g., centralized and distributed storage in the wired Internet). The comparative performance of the various sensing schemes is important to us. Thus, we review key results by carefully examining and explaining the evaluation methodology, in the process gaining insight into vehicular sensor network design. Our comparative study confirms that system performance is impacted by a variety of factors such as wireless access methods, mobility, user location, and popularity of the information.