ABSTRACT
The smart city paradigm is evolving in the current decade to provide a comfortable and happy life to the citizens. Basically, the motto of smart city is to transform a city into a liveable and workable environment with sustainable developments. Mobility is one of the verticals in the smart city framework. It is essential to fulfill the desire for the safety of its users and secure journeys in the urban scenario by developing the smart mobility concept. As vehicles evolve from simple means of transportation to smart entities with new sensing and communication capabilities, those become active members of a smart city. Moreover, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) consists of vehicles that communicate with each other and with public networks through V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle), V2I (vehicle-to-infrastructure), and V2P (vehicle-to-pedestrian) interactions, which enables both the collection and the real-time sharing of critical information about the condition on the road network. It leads to vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) where the vehicles are sharing information among themselves and other smart devices. In fact, VANET is considered to be a specialization of mobile ad hoc network (MANET), which is actually applied to vehicles especially. In addition, the traffic data is accumulated every day through VANET, and it caters to the planning for transportation, mainly intra-city communication. Mention that traffic jams and road accidents are major problems in the current traffic system. Every year lots of people are seriously injured or die in road accidents all over the world. These problems directly affect human lives on the road. VANET can be an aid to prevent these accidents and help in executing the daily traffic in a smooth way.
Furthermore, VANET has some useful applications, such as safety, prevention of collision, blind crossing, dynamic route scheduling, and real-time traffic condition monitoring. Applications of vehicular networks vary from safety applications, such as blind spot warning and traffic light violations, to non-safety applications, such as entertainment, optimal speed advisory, and/or congestion/accident information. VANET intends to provide a sophisticated intelligent transportation system (ITS) with a lot of information out of the traffic data. It also introduces a new scheme consisting of a smart city framework, which transmits information about traffic conditions that will help the driver to make appropriate decisions. Besides, there are some downsides with respect to security and traffic. One of the major security problems with VANET is the lack of a centralized infrastructure. There is no centralized infrastructure in-charge of synchronization and coordination of transmissions makes that one of the hardest tasks in the resulting decentralized and self-organizing VANETs. In this chapter, we present an overview of VANET and its role in smart city development by the means of traffic management and smart mobility. Note that VANET has been one of the rising and challenging research areas in recent years. Moreover, VANETs are still considered as one of the challenging forms of wireless communication technologies that complement ITS. Though research in this field has been ongoing for the last two decades, large-scale practical implementation still requires some time.
