Looking back at the last decade, one can observe enormous progress in the domain of vehicular networking. In this growing community, many ongoing activities focus on the design of communication protocols to support safety applications, intelligent navigation, multi-player gaming, and others. Very large projects have been initiated to validate the theoretic work in field tests and protocols are being standardized. With the increasing interest from industry, security and privacy have also become crucial aspects in the stage of protocol design in order to support a smooth and carefully planned roll-out. We are now entering an era that might change the game in road traffic management. This is supported by the U.S. federal government announcement in December 2016 that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) plans to make V2V devices in new vehicles mandatory. This coincides with the final standardization of higher layer networking protocols in Europe by the ETSI, in the US by IEEE/SA, and in Japan by ARIB.

The vehicular networking research also complements the ongoing activities towards automated driving. Very successful activities started with the Google car and lead to first projects on the road such as the Singapore driverless taxi service or the platooning experiments in Scandinavia, the US, and now Germany.

The management and control of network connections among vehicles and between vehicles and an existing network infrastructure is currently one of the most challenging research fields in the networking domain. Using the terms Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC), Car-2-X (C2X), or Vehicle-2-X (V2X), many applications – as interesting as challenging – have been envisioned and (at least) partially realized. In this context, a very active research field has developed.

In 2010, a first Dagstuhl Seminar (10402) was organized on the topic of inter-vehicular communication. The motivation was to bring together experts in this field to investigate the state of the art and to highlight where sufficient solutions already existed. The main outcome of this very inspiring seminar was that there are indeed research areas within this scope where scientific findings are being consolidated and adopted by industry. This was the consensus of quite intriguing discussions among participants from both industry and academia. Yet, even more aspects have been identified where substantial research is still needed ^[1].

A follow-up seminar (13392) was organized in 2013. The goal was to discuss if and where the previously identified challenges have been adequately addressed, and to highlight where sufficient solutions exist today, where better alternatives need to be found, and also to give directions where to look for such alternatives. Furthermore, it was the goal of this seminar to go one step beyond and identify where IVC can contribute to the basic foundations of computer science. It turned out that quite a number of research questions were still open or insufficiently addressed. This particularly included scalability and real-time capabilities ^[2]. In this Dagstuhl Seminar, we now intend to shift the focus from basic networking principles to networked control applications. We are particularly interested in IVC categories that are thought to yield substantial benefits for the emerging “cooperative automated driving” domain. It is of utmost importance to bring together expertise from classical computer science (computer networking, simulation and modeling, operating system design), from electrical engineering (digital signal processing, communication networks), as well as from automated driving (mechanical engineering, image processing, control theory). In such an inter-disciplinary discourse, we will investigate available communication technologies, assess what is beyond current industry standards such as radar or visible light based communication, as well as intensify discussions of communication protocol design with respect to the needs of (semi-)autonomous cars that have to coordinate maneuvers such as automated platooning or efficient intersection approaches.

Building upon the great success of the first two seminars, with this follow-up seminar, we aim to again bring together experts from all these fields from both academia and industry in order to particularly discuss research challenges related to cooperative automated driving.

^[1] Falko Dressler, Frank Kargl, Jörg Ott, Ozan K. Tonguz and Lars Wischhof, "Research Challenges in Inter-Vehicular Communication - Lessons of the 2010 Dagstuhl Seminar," IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 49 (5), pp. 158-164, May 2011.
^[2] Falko Dressler, Hannes Hartenstein, Onur Altintas and Ozan K. Tonguz, "Inter-Vehicle Communication - Quo Vadis," IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 52 (6), pp. 170-177, June 2014.

Creative Commons BY 3.0 DE

Onur Altintas, Suman Banerjee, Falko Dressler, Geert Heijenk, and Katrin Sjöberg

• Onur Altintas (TOYOTA InfoTechnology Center USA - Mountain V, US) [dblp]
• Ali Balador (RISE SICS - Västerås, SE) [dblp]
• Aruna Balasubramanian (Stony Brook University, US) [dblp]
• Suman Banerjee (University of Wisconsin - Madison, US) [dblp]
• Claudia Campolo (University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, IT) [dblp]
• Wai Chen (China Mobile Research Institute - Beijing, CN) [dblp]
• Sinem Coleri (Koc University - Istanbul, TR) [dblp]
• Falko Dressler (Universität Paderborn, DE) [dblp]
• Eylem Ekici (Ohio State University - Columbus, US) [dblp]
• Sonia Heemstra de Groot (TU Eindhoven, NL) [dblp]
• Thorsten Hehn (Volkswagen AG - Wolfsburg, DE) [dblp]
• Geert Heijenk (University of Twente, NL) [dblp]
• Albert Held (Daimler AG - Ulm, DE) [dblp]
• Frank Kargl (Universität Ulm, DE) [dblp]
• Florian Klingler (Universität Paderborn, DE) [dblp]
• Renato Lo Cigno (University of Trento, IT) [dblp]
• Jörg Ott (TU München, DE) [dblp]
• Elmar Schoch (BMW AG - München, DE) [dblp]
• Michele Segata (University of Trento, IT) [dblp]
• Christoph Sommer (Universität Paderborn, DE) [dblp]
• Jonathan Sprinkle (NSF - Alexandria, US) [dblp]
• Thomas Strang (German Aerospace Center-DLR, DE) [dblp]
• Erik Ström (Chalmers University of Technology - Göteborg, SE) [dblp]
• Isabel Wagner (De Montfort University - Leicester, GB) [dblp]
• Lars Wischhof (Hochschule München, DE) [dblp]
• Lars Wolf (TU Braunschweig, DE) [dblp]
• Andrea Zanella (University of Padova, IT) [dblp]
• Hongwei Zhang (Iowa State University, US) [dblp]