Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks for Social Networks: Requirements and Challenges

[Abstract] Heterogeneous vehicular networks (HetVNETs) are regarded as a promising technique for meeting various requirements of intelligent transportation system (ITS) services. With the rapid development of mobile Internet in the past decade, social networks (SNs) have become an indispensable part of human life. Based on this indivisible relationship between vehicles and users, social characteristics and human behaviors can significantly affect vehicular network performance. Hence, we firstly present two architectures for SNs by introducing social characteristics into the HetVNETs. Then, several user cases are also given in this paper, in which service requirements are analyzed simultaneously. At last, we briefly discuss potential challenges raised by the HetVNETs for SNs.

[Keywords] social network (SN); heterogeneous vehicular network (HetVNET); intelligent transportation system (ITS)