Agnostic middleware for VANETs: specification, implementation and testing

Abstract

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are the basic support for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), providing a framework for its multiple entities to communicate. The communications and services provided to the road entities are generally implemented by means of an On-Board Unit (OBU) and Road Side Unit (RSU), sharing a rather similar hardware and software architectures. These devices need to support multiple communications types and provide access to the needed vehicle data to the applications. Most of the existing solutions demand that the application developers have development control and knowledge about the OBU internals. Thus, most applications are developed by OBU makers and implemented directly on it. However, solutions based on middleware agnosticism separate the OBU internals and software development, facilitating the application development by software makers or researchers. This paper proposes an Application Programming Interface (API) and protocol that can easily be used to access the vehicle internals and services through an agnostic architecture without any knowledge on how they are implemented.