Dear Colleagues,

The development of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) mechanisms and related technologies is accelerating the practical and industrial feasibility of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and associated applications. This is attracting significant efforts from both industry and academia, not only from the automotive and intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) communities but also from the fields of wireless and mobile sensor networks, edge computing for advanced wireless infrastructures, autonomous and quasi-autonomous cyber physical systems, and mobile collaborative applications in general. In this context, many currently ongoing national and international collaboration projects practically demonstrate relevant interest from government, industry, and academia in the field.

In particular, vehicular sensor networks (VSNs) have become increasingly interesting and popular due to the recent advances in inter-vehicular communication technologies, to the decreasing cost of communication devices, and to emerging wireless communication mechanisms and architectures that promise almost zero-latency and almost 100%-reliability in complex and wide-scale urban scenarios (e.g., 5g edge computing). Unlike traditional wireless sensor nodes, vehicles are not typically affected by energy constraints and can easily be equipped with powerful processing units, wireless communication devices, GPS, and sensing devices, such as chemical detectors, still/video cameras, LIDARs, and vibration and acoustic sensors. Thus, they enable new and promising sensing applications, such as traffic reporting, relief to environmental monitoring, and distributed surveillance, to mention a few.

In this context, this Special Issue is willing to provide a fresh overview and an original perspective by primarily focusing on collaborative sensing and applications, where distributed vehicles interwork together in order to provide enhanced functionality and services, even in the context of stringent non-functional requirements, e.g., in terms of latency, scalability, reliability, trustfulness in open deployment environments, etc. Therefore, this Special Issue intends to disseminate the latest research results in this emergent research area, by providing a fresh snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in VANETs, collaborative VSNs, collaborative VANET-based protocols and infrastructure services, and collaborative VSN applications (including actuation operations capable of modifying the execution environment where vehicles can move). To this purpose, we are seeking high-quality papers reporting original research results and practical experiences of system design/prototyping/deployment related to topics that include but are not limited to the following:

• Original algorithms and protocols for VSN mobile sensing;
• Original middleware and platforms for the support of VSN systems and applications;
• Collaborative vehicles as distributed sensors and actuators in smart cities;
• Vehicle-oriented crowdsensing and opportunistic participation;
• Vehicle-oriented mobile cloud computing, edge computing, and fog computing;
• 5G and edge computing for virtualized resources with minimum latency in collaborative VSN applications;
• Intra-vehicular monitoring and integration with legacy vehicular systems;
• Efficient and locality-enhanced QoS support for quality sensitive VSN applications;
• Data dissemination solutions for collaborative VSN applications;
• Online stream processing for collaborative VSN applications;
• Performance, scalability, reliability, and efficiency of VSN platforms, infrastructures, and applications;
• Standardization efforts (e.g., OpenFog, ETSI multi-access edge computing) for collaborative VSNs;
• Case studies of VSN infrastructures and applications over wide-scale urban environments;
• Safety, enhanced navigation, and car alert collaborative applications;
• From autonomous driving to collaborative driving based on collaborative VSNs;
• Efficient mobility models and vehicle traffic models;
• Simulation aspects of V2V, V2I, and collaborative VSNs;
• Emulation and testbeds for large-scale collaborative VSNs;
• Security, encryption, and privacy for collaborative VSNs.

Prof. Dr. Paolo Bellavista
Guest Editor

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• Vehicular sensor networks
• Cooperative vehicular networking
• Cooperative vehicular applications
• Edge computing (multi-access edge computing, 5G, …) for cooperative vehicles
• Fog computing for cooperative vehicles
• Scalability and wide-scale validation of cooperative vehicle solutions
• Privacy-preserving cooperative vehicles