The responsible for the R&D Mobility area of Barcelona Digital Technologyl Centre, Dr. Marc Torrent, has participated in the elaboration of a book titled VANET: Vehicular Applications and Inter-Networking Technologies, published this past month in January by the English editorial John Wiley & Sons, and offers an analysis of the state of the art and perspectives of the communications among vehicles, demonstrating that they serve to reduce accidents, improve the efficiency of the transportation and minimize the environmental impact. In more detail, Torrent is the co-author of the chapter titled, "MAC Layer and Scalability Aspects of Vehicular Communication Networks", where different techniques of access to the channel are proposed in order to solve the existing challenges.
The book, coordinated by Hannes Hartenstein, professor of decentralized systems and services of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) of Germany, and by Kenneth Laberteaux, main researcher of the United States Toyota Technical Center, gathers the principal contributions fulfilled by distinguished technological experts from this field, undertaking the vehicle to vehicle communications and vehicle to infrastructure.
The VANET, one of the lines of investigation of the area of R&D Mobility of Barcelona Digital, is a mobile communications network concept capable of transmitting information between vehicles and traffic infrastructures (placards, traffic lights, information centers, tolls, etc.). This type of network is included inside the intelligent systems of transportation or ITS. The main objective is to provide security and comfort to the users of vehicles, at the same time permit the access to multimedia contents and Internet.