Research

PI: Prof. Hsin-Mu (Michael) Tsai    Co-PI: Prof. Kate Ching-Ju Lin   
Intel Champions: Xingang Guo & Rick Roberts

Scooters are one of the most important transportation means in Taiwan, Thailand, as well as several European countries. Statistics show that in Taiwan approximately 70% of the total number of mobile vehicles (which includes trucks, passenger cars, scooters, and buses) are scooters. They are popular in the urban areas since it is easy to navigate through heavy traffic with them due to their smaller size and also among the citizens in the suburban areas due to their low costs. Unlike regular passenger vehicles or buses (for which the research community have proposed Vehicular Ad hoc Networks, or VANETs), there is very little research which focuses on communications or networking between scooters on the road.
In this project, the main objective is to develop a new network infrastructure in order to provide network connectivity to scooters, as well as other node types with low mobility, such as pedestrians and bikes.With the capabilities to communicate directly with other vehicles on the road orwith the cloud (via pre-deployed relay stations, e.g., a cellular base station or a road-side unit), they can also be provided with a safer, smarter and more efficient transportation environment.
Due to the high node density and high network size nature of this network, as well as the fact that the system design has to be energy and cost efficient for scooters and other low-mobility nodes, we believe that it would be a challenging case of M2M networks worth to be studied; the guidelines derived from this research could provide insights on the design of a more generic and unifying M2M network.