Ubiquitous information provision in the vehicle domain

Information sharing and provision in the vehicular field is nowadays a growing research topic in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Although a lot of work is being carried out in these terms, the most of the approximations are based on local solutions which solve a particular problem. Communication protocols are proposed to exchange information among vehicles in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), monitoring centres provide information about traffic, advertising mechanisms send location-based notifications about local shops. The system presented in this paper proposes an integrated infrastructure for information sharing in both local and global schemes. Using a novel communication paradigm based on cellular and peer to peer (P2P) networks, traffic information is shared among close vehicles and sent to a core infrastructure for a global processing. This centralized system is able to provide not only traffic events, but also general context-aware information adapted to the user's preferences. The complete design has been developed over a whole prototype, considering both hardware and software requirements.