Social Aspect of Vehicular Communications

The interconnection of devices is expected to grow and to incorporate systems that used to be isolated. As the vehicle evolves from a simple transport machine to an intelligent entity that collects information from the environment and uses it in order to take decisions in real time, it is becoming an active member of a smart city. The integration of vehicular communications with smartphones helps vehicles connect with each other and take decisions that improve driving in terms of safety, reduced fuel consumption and comfort. The social behavior of drivers is an asset that can be used in order to predict their mobility in a city and to produce novel algorithms that can cope with these aspects in an efficient way. In this article, we present a social perspective of ad hoc vehicular networks and propose novel ranking, clustering and routing methods. We also discuss security issues that arise from the interconnection of vehicles.