With the advancement of wireless technology, vehicular ad hoc networks
(VANETs) are emerging as a promising approach to realizing "smart
cities" and addressing many important transportation problems such as
road safety, efficiency, and convenience. This brief provides an
introduction to the large trace data set collected from thousands of
taxis and buses in Shanghai, the largest metropolis in China. It also
presents the challenges, design issues, performance modeling and
evaluation of a wide spectrum of VANET research topics, ranging from
realistic vehicular mobility models and opportunistic routing, to
real-time vehicle tracking and urban sensing applications. In addition
to the latest research and techniques, the reader will also learn the
trace-driven methodologies and tools of performance modeling and
analysis, network protocol design and optimization, and network
simulation, thus keeping pace with the fast moving VANET research and
development.