Electric Vehicles (EVs) are gaining momentum due to several factors, including the price reduction as well as the climate and environmental awareness. This paper reviews the advances of EVs regarding battery technology trends, charging methods, as well as new research challenges and open opportunities. More specifically, an analysis of the worldwide market situation of EVs and their future prospects is carried out. Given that one of the fundamental aspects in EVs is the battery, the paper presents a thorough review of the battery technologies—from the Lead-acid batteries to the Lithium-ion. Moreover, we review the different standards that are available for EVs charging process, as well as the power control and battery energy management proposals. Finally, we conclude our work by presenting our vision about what is expected in the near future within this field, as well as the research aspects that are still open for both industry and academic communities.

Over the years, we have harnessed the power of computing to improve the speed of operations and increase in productivity. Also, we have witnessed the merging of computing and telecommunications. This excellent combination of two important fields has propelled our capability even further, allowing us to communicate anytime and anywhere, improving our work flow and increasing our quality of life tremendously. The next wave of evolution we foresee is the convergence of telecommunication, computing, wireless, and transportation technologies. Once this happens, our roads and highways will be both our communications and transportation platforms, which will completely revolutionize when and how we access services and entertainment, how we communicate, commute, navigate, etc., in the coming future. This paper presents an overview of the current state-of-the-art, discusses current projects, their goals, and finally highlights how emergency services and road safety will evolve with the blending of vehicular communication networks with road transportation.

Wireless communication technologies have now greatly impact our daily lives. From indoor wireless LANs to outdoor cellular mobile networks, wireless technologies have benefited billions of users around the globe. The era of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is now evolving, gaining attention and momentum. Researchers and developers have built VANET simulation software to allow the study and evaluation of various media access, routing, and emergency warning protocols. VANET simulation is fundamentally different from MANETs (mobile ad hoc networks) simulation because in VANETs, vehicular environment imposes new issues and requirements, such as constrained road topology, multi‐path fading and roadside obstacles, traffic flow models, trip models, varying vehicular speed and mobility, traffic lights, traffic congestion, drivers' behavior, etc. Currently, there are VANET mobility generators, network simulators, and VANET simulators. This paper presents a comprehensive study and comparisons of the various publicly available VANET simulation software and their components. In particular, we contrast their software characteristics, graphical user interface (GUI), popularity, ease of use, input requirements, output visualization capability, accuracy of simulation, etc. Finally, while each of the studied simulators provides a good simulation environment for VANETs, refinements and further contributions are needed before they can be widely used by the research community. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Currently, the number of vehicles increases every year, raising the probability of having accidents. When an accident occurs, wireless technologies enable vehicles to share warning messages with other vehicles by using vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications, and with the emergency services by using vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications. Regarding vehicle to infrastructure communications, Road Side Units (RSUs) act similarly to wireless LAN access points, and can provide communications with the infrastructure. Since RSUs are usually very expensive to install, authorities limit their number, especially in suburbs and areas of sparse population, making RSUs a precious resource in vehicular environments. In this paper, we propose a Density-based Road Side Unit deployment policy (D-RSU), specially designed to obtain an efficient system with the lowest possible cost to alert emergency services in case of an accident. Our approach is based on deploying RSUs using an inverse proportion to the expected density of vehicles. The obtained results show how D-RSU is able to reduce the required number of RSUs, as well as the accident notification time.

Various countries throughout the world have started their efforts in designing and implementing smart cities. China alone has over 300 smart city projects, with strong participation by industries and government offices. India too have allocated trillions in budget to build over 100 smart cities. An essential part of a smart city is transport. In this paper, we will discuss the current state, developments, and some of the emerging advances in transportation technologies and how these advances in smart roads will prepare the society towards the realization of future smart cities.

Ad hoc networking is regarded as an adequate solution to cooperative driving between communicating cars on the road. Deploying and testing these networks, usually known as Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), involves a high cost in the real world, and so simulation is an useful alternative in research. One of the most critical issues in a simulation study of VANETs is the use of a mobility model which resembles, as closely as possible, the real behavior of vehicular traffic. Mobility models are crucial to obtain accurate and meaningful simulation results. In this paper we present CityMob, a mobility pattern generator for VANETs. Citymob allows researchers to easily create urban mobility scenarios, including the possibility to model car accidents. We designed and developed it targeting compatibility with the ns- 2 simulator, and we implemented three different mobility models: Simple Model (SM), Manhattan Model (MM) and Downtown Model (DM). Based on a flooding alert protocol we show that the most realistic mobility model to simulate traffic accidents is the Downtown model. We also find that, for flooding to be effective, a moderate number of vehicles is required.