Challenges and opportunities in immersive vehicular sensing: Lessons from urban deployments

Vehicles provide an ideal platforms for a plethora of emerging applications such as networked gaming, multimedia content delivery and urban sensing. Cars have no power constraints and they can be instrumented with high end computational units and graphic devices. The deployment at scale of urban vehicular systems, however, requires a careful design able to consider challenges across several domains. Vehicular systems are arguably a prominent example of cyber-physical systems. The development of such systems requires a truly multidisciplinary approach and a close integration between the application, communication, and physical domains. Hardware and software mounted on vehicles will face a harsh physical and communication environment that will greatly affect all the system components. In this paper we report on the challenges and opportunities for multimedia vehicular urban sensing systems based on our field experiences in Macao (China) and Los Angels (USA). We designed and built the components for a pollution monitoring system able to support closed-loop optimization between pollution and traffic management. Our initial set of prototype vehicles are now running in the city of Macao and they are measuring the air parameters as well as the urban traffic. The paper aims at exposing some of the issues encountered, outlining the problems of a city wide deployment, and augmenting our in-field experience with the results from large scale simulation studies.