Project Overview

The project NoW - Network on Wheels, is a research project partly funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMB+F) and lasts from June 2004 until May 2008.

The basic project goal is to develop a platform for inter-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communication. The system is based on wireless multi-hop communication in vehicular ad hoc networks for inter-vehicle communication. The main goal is to improve the driver's and passenger's safety and comfort.

From Mannheim's perspective, the NoW project is a follow-up project to the project "Fleetnet - Internet on the Road". In continuation of FleetNet, the NoW project partners complete the technological basis (antenna, radio, communication software), implement a reference system and develop applications for active safety. System and communication security as well as business models and market introduction scenarios are other working items. Field trials will be conducted and the project contributes to European standardization for inter-vehicle communication.

Key design requirements for the NoW system are the capability to distribute and provide data in a position-aware fashion. In general, Location awareness and position data play a crucial role not only for NoW applications but also for the communication protocols deployed.

The focus of NEC, University of Karlsruhe, and University of Mannheim (a.k.a NEC-Kar-Mann) is on the communication system. Main technical issues are improvement of the robustness of communication under realistic wireless conditions, routing in 2-dimensional environments (i.e. cities), and reliability of message transmission for active safety and Internet applications. In order to achieve these goals we modify the overall communication protocol stack. Refering to classic layering, this affects mainly routing and transport protocols, but also including medium access control and application layer protocols (cross-layer optimization). Furthermore, we work in the working group "System Architecture".

Since the University of Mannheim-together with NEC-was mainly responsible for the implementation and evaluation of the communication system in the former project FleetNet, we also plan to bring our research results into a car-based testbed.