Dear all,

Please find below information about a special issue very related to the C2C-CC activities.

Thank you very much,

Carlos

IEEE Network Special Issue on "Advances in Vehicular Communications Networks"

Background Vehicular communications are being applied to improve safety, decrease fuel consumption, and increase the capacity of existing roadways. Both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications are used to implement a number of promising applications such as local hazard warning, efficient route planning and coordination of traffic flows. Even truly cooperative and, therefore, extremely challenging applications like cross traffic collision avoidance are being considered.

In the last years a number of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) related projects and initiatives have been carried out (or will be completed soon). In Europe, for example, the European Commission initiated the eSafety Program to reduce the road fatalities by 50% before 2010 and to improve traffic efficiency. These R&D projects have created a solid technical basis for vehicular communications, and some of them have also performed some preliminary experiences, from what some important results have been obtained ("lessons learned"), as for example the Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) in the US as well as several projects in Europe.

All the aforementioned research efforts and initiatives can be considered as the 'phase 1' in the development of vehicular communications networks. This phase represents an initial and very important step towards the goals of improving road safety and traffic efficiency, and providing Internet services to the vehicles. Important achievements, architectural decisions and conclusions have been the outcome of this 'phase 1', such as the development of wireless physical and MAC protocols suited for the vehicular environment (e.g. IEEE 802.11p), new network architectures (some of them not based on classical TCP/IP), etc.

We are now witnessing the 'phase 2' of research and development in vehicular communications networks, a new phase in which standardization and field trials will play a key role, as well as the refinement and extension of the network architectures and protocols defined in the 'phase 1'.

Scope and Contributions The goal of this special issue is to share the research developments and efforts of this new phase ('phase 2') in the vehicular communications area. Paper submissions are invited on the following topics:

* Overview of state-of-the-art for vehicular communication technologies and open challenges. * Network protocols for cooperative vehicular communications, such as geonetworking (geographical routing and addressing). * Networking aspects for use of 2G/3G cellular systems for vehicular communications. * New system architectures enabling the provision of safety, traffic efficiency and infotainment services in vehicular scenarios. * Security, location privacy and reliability issues. * Integration of IP protocols into the vehicular scenario. * Standardization for vehicular communications worldwide, interoperability and harmonization issues. * Field operational tests (FOTs) for cooperative systems employing vehicular communications networks. * Regulatory aspects.

Submission Articles should be tutorial in nature and should be written in a style comprehensible to readers outside the speciality of the article. Prospective authors must prepare their article in accordance with the IEEE Network guidelines to authors, see http://www.comsoc.org/livepubs/ni/info/authors.html. Authors should submit their manuscript to the guest editors according to the schedule below (authors are encouraged to notify at least 15 days before deadline, their intention to submit a paper indicating title, abstract, authors and keywords).

All submissions will be reviewed based on technical merit and relevance.

Schedule for Submission Manuscript submission: July 15, 2009 Acceptance notification: September 15, 2009 Final manuscript due: November 1, 2009 Publication date: January 2010

Guest Editors Dr. Carlos J. Bernardos (corresponding editor) Associate Professor, Department of Telematics Engineering Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Leganes, Spain cjbc@it.uc3m.es

Dr. Andreas Festag NEC Europe Ltd. - NEC Laboratories Europe Network Research Division Heidelberg, Germany festag@nw.neclab.eu

Dr. Nicholas F. Maxemchuk Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering Columbia University New York, USA and Chief Researcher IMDEA Networks Madrid, Spain nick@ee.columbia.edu

Dr. Carolina Pinart Gilberga Telefónica I+D Head of the Networked Vehicles Division Madrid, Spain cpg@tid.es

Dr. Christian Weiß Daimler AG Group Research and Advanced Engineering Manager Vehicle-Centric Communication Sindelfingen, Germany Christian.A.Weiss@daimler.com