There has been growing interest in vehicle to vehicle networking for a broad range of applications ranging from safe driving to advertising, commerce and games. One emerging application is urban surveillance. Vehicles monitor the environment, classify the events, e.g., license plate readings, and exchange metadata with neighbors in a peer-to-peer fashion, creating a totally distributed index of all the events to be accessed by mobile users. For instance, the Department of Transportation extracts traffic congestion statistics; the Department of Health monitors pollutants, and; Law Enforcement Agents carry out forensic investigations. Mobile, vehicular sensing differs significantly from conventional wireless sensing. The vehicles have no strict limits on battery life, processing power and storage capabilities. Moreover they can generate an enormous volume of data, making conventional sensor harvesting inadequate. In this talk we first review popular V2V applications and then introduce MobEyes, a middleware solution that diffuses data summaries to create a distributed index of the sensed data. We discuss the challenges of designing and maintain such a system, from information dissemination to harvesting, routing and privacy.

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Dr. Mario Gerla, Professor, UCLA, Computer Science Dept. Dr. Gerla received his Engineering degree from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 1966 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA in 1970 and 1973. He became IEEE Fellow in 2002. At UCLA, he was part of a small team that developed the early ARPANET protocols under the guidance of Prof. Leonard Kleinrock. He worked at Network Analysis Corporation, New York, from 1973 to 1976, transferring the ARPANET technology to several Government and Commercial Networks. He joined the Faculty of the Computer Science Department at UCLA in 1976, where he is now Professor. At UCLA he has designed and implemented some of the most popular and cited network protocols for ad hoc wireless networks including distributed clustering, multicast (ODMRP and CODECast) and transport (TCP Westwood) under DARPA and NSF grants. He has lead the $12M, 6 year ONR MINUTEMAN project, designing the next generation scalable airborne Internet for tactical and homeland defense scenarios. He is now leading two advanced wireless network projects under ARMY and IBM funding. In the commercial network scenario, with NSF and Industry sponsorship, he has led the development of vehicular communications for safe navigation, urban sensing and location awareness. A parallel research activity covers personal P2P communications including cooperative, networked medical monitoring (see www.cs.ucla.edu/NRL for recent publications).