A survey on context-aware vehicular network applications

Transportation is considered as one of the main human needs in any country for macro-level planning. Due to increased production of vehicles, problems and issues associated with transportation systems have been taken on wider dimensions. Thanks to rapid technological developments, Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) have been used to provide effective opportunities for enhancing the safety of roads and for improving transportation networks. Various context-aware applications have been designed on vehicular ad hoc networks, offering a wide range of services to drivers, including traffic management, collision avoidance, and convenient supports, just to name a few. This paper reviews and classifies existing context-aware applications as used in vehicular networks. A classification framework with three dimensions including the environment, system-and-application, and context-awareness is proposed. This framework is then used to review the existing context-aware transportation systems for each dimension, which in turn consists of some parameters. Based on this framework, existing context-aware research projects are reviewed and classified. Finally, a clear vision of research directions in this area is described.