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.