Pervasive Computing applied to Cars

This paper presents an architecture called PeSoV using new emerging technologies to increase the security, reliability and connectivity of motorized vehicles. Many people die because of car accidents caused by lack of attention and imprudence of car drivers. Some technologies like the standard IEEE 1609, Zigbee and a network of ranging sensors can be used as tools to help the driver to avoid accidents. PeSoV is composed of three subsystems: a car health management subsystem responsible to care about the good function of the car; a car-car communication subsystem responsible to allow the communication between cars; and a collision predict subsystem that will warn the driver in case of an possible collision. INTRODUCTION In the end of the century 19th the modern car started to take its shape. Since that time, the automobile was always dependent of a human driver, and like everything that needs a person, it is susceptible to human fails. In the year of 2006, 822 USA citizens died in Iraq war [1], but 42 thousand people died in USA because of car accidents. 75% of the deaths were vehicle occupants, 13% of these people were pedestrians and 12% were motorcyclists [2]. Most of these accidents happened because the driver was not paying attention to the environment around him, and the human mind is not fast enough to avoid some kinds of obstacles. These deaths could be avoided or at least reduced by a computer driver. Communication between cars and other facilities on the road was not conceived as something easy. It is until the time that IEEE has established the family of standards 1609. This family of standards encompasses a bundle of standards for vehicle communications from vehicle-to-vehicle to vehicle-to-roadside signs while providing other standards that handles security issues, networking, and data transmission issues. Such standards are adopted in the proposed system in this paper that serves as an overview of what we can do with vehicles with these set of standards from increasing safety to smoothing traffic problems. The best model that can take opportunity of these standards in vehicles is Ubiquitous Computing. For its philosophy of seamless integration of technology and computing in daily life [3], pervasive computing fit as the best model for inventing and developing systems for cars that help increase safety margins and handle traffic problems while minimizing road accidents. We will adapt the pervasive computing paradigm in such proposed system as a mean to seamlessly enable cars to be intelligent in monitoring and tracking their own health condition and act on it; to be able to communicate with other cars on the road for information; to be able to discover the road ahead. In other words, according to the proposed system with the aid of IEEE 1609 family of standards, cars became like a network of computers in which a car is like a computer node on a network that is able to communicate with other nodes. Not only this, each car’s internal parts are treated as a network of mechanical parts similar to a network of computers in which a car’s mechanical parts can communicate and synchronize matters among each other. This paper is organized by stating some other related work in the next section; subsequently, the proposed system details shall be discussed in its three subsystems; and finally, challenges and future research directions ended by conclusions are discussed.