Green motorway vehicular networks
The information age has pushed the requirement of data transfer to a vehicular frontier whereby the safety and comfort of drivers can significantly be enhanced by time critical communications in rural and urban areas.
Safety along with the growing reliance on infotainment is driving the development of a dedicated vehicular network that spans an allencompassing coverage area. Where safety critical and multimedia applications urge for stringent network requirements, the vehicular environment has posed several obstacles to researchers in meeting those demands. This burden is compounded by growing environmental concerns
that have compelled the greening of information and communication technologies including vehicular communication networks.

As maintaining quality of service (QoS) for the intended applications is hindered by the dynamic nature of the vehicular environment, innovative protocols and architectures need to be devised and systematically analysed
to meet the requirements. Furthermore gains in energy efficiency tend to be achieved by limiting equipment operation, and hence QoS performance. An optimal balance is therefore required to maximise energy savings with
bounds on QoS. Furthermore renewable energy solutions provide a green and more flexible alternative power source but their variable nature must be studied to ensure they meet QoS requirements. Finally, with the impracticality and expense of field tests the methodology of accurately
studying vehicular networks presents a problem on its own.

This thesis designs studies and attempts to improve the QoS and energy performance of a motorway vehicular network by taking account of realistic traffic flows, packet sizes, physical layer characteristics, and wind speeds.
The performance of routing protocols such as most forward and shortest hop schemes has been studied and optimised. A number of optimal hop lengths have been determined. Medium access protocols (MAC) such as fixed and dynamic channel allocation, 802.11p and the modified packet reservation
protocols have been analysed. A novel micro/macro network architecture has been proposed to enhance energy efficiency by enabling sleep cycles and renewable energy use in road side units. Finally the reliability of wind renewable energy has been investigated.