Automated Conﬁguration of Vehicular Communication Services Franco Callegati, Aldo Campi, Walter Cerroni DEIS - University of Bologna, Italy e-mail: {franco.callegati,aldo.campi,walter.cerroni}@unibo.it Giovanni Pau, Mario Gerla UCLA - Computer Science Department, USA e-mail: {gpau,mgerla}@ucla.edu Abstract—This paper presents the experimental of a signaling infrastructure which can be successfully used to automatically conﬁgure vehicular network services. I. I NTRODUCTION The increasing public awareness regarding environmental is- sues may be a reason of increased interest in VANETs. Appli- cations such as pollution monitoring at the micro-geographical scale, and the diffusion of all electrical vehicles (AEV) [1] may highly beneﬁt from ubiquitous vehicular communication. These application scenarios are similar, with on-board com- munication systems which must talk with the sensors and/or with the AEV power and engine management system and exploit vehicular connectivity to share the data with other vehicles and/or upload them into external databases. The connectivity must opportunistically rely on various wireless technologies (GSM/UMTS, Wi-Fi hot spots, Wi-Max), but the communication characteristics and the application dialog must be adapted to the speciﬁc goals as described in recent examples of applications as reported in [2] or [3]. For this latter reason, the support of service management functionalities is required to conﬁgure proper communication service proﬁles depending on the location, the type of vehicle, the service objectives etc. Today this requires mostly manually conﬁguration. Such conﬁguration may be automated exploiting a network logical layer which supports service management and conﬁguration, which will be called Transport Service Layer (TSL) in the following. The ﬁnal goal of this paper is to report the preliminary results of a real life experiments showing a possible implementation of a TSL, based on existing and well known protocols and infrastructures. II. TRANSPORT SERVICE LAYER ARCHITECTURE The signaling infrastructure supporting the TSL is based on an architecture decoupling the signaling protocol, which deﬁnes the syntax used for the communication service ne- gotiation, from the descriptive language, which provides the semantics to describe the service features (resources to be used, requirements to be satisﬁed, etc.). This approach is very generally and can be applied to different scenarios. It was originally experimented to support grid computing [4], but has also been used more recently to manage cross layer resource allocations in cloud computing [5]. The TSL architecture is based on the SIP protocol, used as an application independent signaling layer able to provide dialog management between remote application entities with general features. The choice of using SIP has been driven by its extensive use and large set of extensions. Besides the signaling protocol the TSL needs additional semantics able to provide an ontology knowledge, to this purpose a semantic network language, called NRDL [6], is encapsulated in the SIP messages to provide a logical description of the requested network service. In this article we do not investigate the algorithms and methodologies which can be used to process the NRDL message and retrieve/reserve/optimize the communication re- sources, but focus on the signaling infrastructure to show that the integration of SIP and NRDL provides the communication and information management functionalities needed to support the TSL plane for vehicular networks. The nice feature of this proposal is that it is based on well known protocols and technologies, therefore it can be deployed with limited fresh investments. III. PRACTICAL EXPERIMENT A practical experiment was set up for demonstration pur- poses exploiting C-VeT, the vehicular test-bed at UCLA which provides both V2V and V2I connectivity [7]. In the exper- iment here reported the communication was obtained using MobiMESH, the hybrid mesh network in C-VeT, consisting of a Mesh Backbone and an access network which can be used by standard Wi-Fi clients to get connectivity. The TSL testbed demonstrator was implemented with 3 nodes running a Linux Virtual Machines running the TSL implementation (SIP protocol and NRDL parser). The node representing the infrastructure has been equipped with an As- terisk SIP server dealing with authorization and authentication. It is responsible to accept a service request and to forward proper information on how to exploit the infrastructure. The application server node deals with proper conﬁguration of each vehicle, providing conﬁguration parameters set-up for the on-board system, including information about V2V connectiv- ity or about the server in the infrastructure to upload the data. It has been implemented with a SIP User Agent based on an enhanced version of the PJSIP 1 stack. For convenience they were both placed in the same physical server. The end user 1 PJSIP open-source multimedia communication library, http://www.pjsip.org 2012 International Conference on Connected Vehicles and Expo 978-0-7695-4900-2/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICCVE.2012.31 128