Wireless Communication in Car?

The evolution in mobile and wireless communication technology allows passengers and drivers in vehicles to use the Internet while they are on the road. Built-in equipment in cars or trucks can easily access travelling-related dynamic information, such as the current situation on the roads, weather forecasts, or information on local points of interests. However, personal information of the vehicle’s passengers ? which could be also very useful for their travel ? is usually distributed over various different devices, such as PDAs, PTAs, cellular phones, or laptops. Thus, this information is not easily accessible by the driver or the built-in equipment. In this paper, we envision future scenarios that might come up if those devices within a vehicle are able to communicate and interact with each other. Therefore, we discuss the characteristics of wireless infrastructure-based and ad-hoc networks for communication between mobile devices in vehicles in order to establish a local and integrated information system. Wireless communication systems are very interesting for communication in vehicles as the heterogeneity of devices bring a plethora of different plugs and interfaces for wired communication. We describe the Bluetooth de-facto standard in detail, which is one encouraging technology for those future scenarios. Bluetooth is a communication technology that is basically optimized for communication between small devices in mobile and wireless ad-hoc networks.