Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks: An

Information-Centric Perspective
2010-09-13
      Author:Bo Yu, Chengzhong Xu

Abstract:Emerging Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANET) have the potential to improve the
safety and efficiency of future highways. This paper reviews recent advances in wireless
communication technologies with regard to their applications in vehicular environments. Four
basic demands of future VANET applications are identified, and the research challenges in
different protocol layers are summarized. Information dissemination is one of the most important
aspects of VANET research. This paper also discusses the primary issues in information
dissemination from an information-centric perspective, and provides two case studies. Finally,
future research directions and possible starting points for new solutions are considered.

1 Introduction
Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANET) are becoming an integral technology for
connecting daily life to computer networks. They could greatly improve the
driving experience both in terms of safety and efficiency. As shown in Figure
1, when multi-hop communication is implemented, VANET enables a vehicle to
communicate with other vehicles which are out of sight or even out of radio
transmission range. It also enables vehicles to communicate with roadside
infrastructure. VANET will likely be an essential part of future Intelligent
Transportation Systems (ITS).

    Currently, ITS relies heavily on infrastructure deployment.

Electromagnetic sensors, for example, are embedded into the road surface;
traffic cameras are deployed at major intersections; and Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) readers are deployed at highway entrances. A typical
procedure for collecting and distributing traffic information is as follows.
First, traffic samples are gathered by road surface sensors and uploaded to a
municipal transport center. After data processing, traffic reports can then be
delivered to a
user’s cell phone via cellular networks. This is an expensive and inefficient
way of disseminating location-based information, especially when the
information of interest is only a few hundred meters from the user’s physical
location. With its short-range communication capabilities, VANET may change
this paradigm and make generating and disseminating information more
straightforward.

    VANET can also serve as a large-scale wireless sensor network for
future ITS because every modern vehicle can be regarded as a super sensor
node. For example, all new vehicles are usually equipped with exterior and
interior thermometers, light sensors, one or more cameras, microphones,
ultrasound radar, and other sensory features. Moreover, future vehicles will
also be equipped with an on-board computer, wireless radio, and a GPS
receiver, which will enable them to communicate with each other and with
roadside units.  A wireless sensor network of such magnitude is
unprecedented, and perceptive computer systems will extend to every corner of
the globe. Information can be generated and shared locally in a peer-to-peer
manner without the need for restrictive infrastructure.

    The capabilities of future vehicles open up a number of potential

applications for use in daily life. The main applications of VANET can be
categorized as:

    Safety applications: pre-collision warning, electronic road signs,

traffic light violation warning, online vehicle diagnosis, and road condition
detection.  This type of application usually takes advantage of short-range
communication to perform real-time detection and provide warnings to
driversEfficiency applications: municipal traffic management, traffic
congestion detection, route planning, highway tolling, and public
transportation management. This type of application is dedicated to improving
both individual and public travel efficiencyCommercial applications: Location-
Based Services (LBS) will give rise to a variety of commercial applications
such as nearby restaurant specials, cheap gas stations, or even shopping
center promotions. Such commercial applications may spur new competition among
local businesses.

    Infotainment applications: video and music sharing, location-based

restaurant or store reviews, carpooling, and social networking.  Already,
infotainment applications such as Ford Sync[1] and Kia UVO have become
attractive add-ons in the  vehicle market. The networking of infotainment
systems will surely be a trend in the near future.

    An abundance of VANET applications will benefit a wide range of

parties: from governments and vehicle manufacturers to local retailers and
consumers. Although a few Geographic Information Systems (GIS) companies—such
as Google, Garmin, and TomTom—have engaged in collecting and distributing
traffic information, traditionally, ITS development and deployment has been
the domain of governments. In the future, many more participants will be
attracted to VANET and will profit from it.  Vehicle manufacturers could
predict a boost in their sales by selling VANET-enabled vehicles.  Fitting
vehicles with a variety of electronic controls and devices is a growing trend,
especially fitting electronic safety and information systems. Ford Sync is a
very successful example of vehicle infotainment. Moreover, local retailers and
service providers will also be interested in promoting their sales via VANET.
They could broadcast commercials to passing vehicles and even devise hourly
pricing strategies. Local businesses may gain a competitive advantage or face
greater competition.  Undoubtedly, consumers will be the beneficiary of
enhanced safety and efficiency, cheaper goods, enriched entertainment, and
other advantages.

    In this paper, the following section reviews recent advances in

wireless communication technologies with regard to their applications in
vehicular environments. Section 3 identifies four fundamental demands of
future VANET applications. Section 4 discusses existing challenges in
different network protocol layers. Section 5 further discusses several
research topics in information dissemination from an information-centric
perspective. Section 6 concludes.

2 Wireless Technologies and Vehicular Communications

Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN) using IEEE 802.15 standards have been
largely successful in consumer electronics (including vehicular electronics).
Ford Sync is a good example. With Bluetooth technology, a cell phone can be
connected to the vehicle’s audio system enabling a driver to make calls or
play hands-free music using voice commands. 802.11 (a/b/g) WLAN technologies
have been widely deployed because of their mass production and relatively low
cost. Although 802.11 (a/b/g) was not originally designed for vehicular
communications, many studies (in particular References[2-4]) have focused on
applying 802.11 to vehicular environments because of the pervasiveness of its
technologies. IEEE 802.11p[5] introduces enhancements to 802.11 which are
needed to support Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE). This
includes data exchange between high-speed vehicles and between vehicles and
roadside infrastructure in the licensed ITS band of 5.9 GHz.
    Another emerging technology is Wireless Metropolitan Area Network
(WirelessMAN), also called Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access
(WiMAX) (IEEE 802.16). It is aimed at providing wireless data over long
distances in a variety of ways, from fixed point-to-point links to full mobile
cellular type access. Currently, the most common form of automobile
connectivity is based on cellular telephony and is known as automotive
telematics. Typical examples include GM’s OnStar system and Ford’s RESCU
system. Several GIS companies, including TomTom and Garmin, also use cellular
networks to transmit real-time traffic information. Usually, cellular-based
telematics is a paid service based on user subscription.
In the near future, it is envisioned that architecture of vehicular networks
will be hybrid, as shown in Figure 2. In this architecture, long-distance
communication techniques, such as cellular networks and WiMAX, will provide
vehicles with instant Internet access, while short-distance communication
techniques, such as Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC)[6] and
Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), will provide short-range real-time support in an ad
hoc manner.
VANET, based on DSRC, Wi-Fi, and other short range communication techniques,
will play an important role in future ITS. Compared to infrastructure
networks, VANET has two main advantages. It is cheap to deploy and operate,
and consumers can enjoy service without subscription. VANET is also
essentially a cyber-physical system, which enables communication between two
geographically neighboring nodes. This has real-time safety and other
applications.

 
3 Requirements of VANET Applications
Future VANET applications will have four fundamental demands: scalability,
availability, context-awareness, and security and privacy.

    (1) Scalability

    Because of the number of vehicles that could be incorporated into
vehicular networks, VANET may become the largest ad hoc network in history.
Undoubtedly, scalability will be a critical factor. The advantages of hybrid
architecture, together with in-network aggregation techniques and P2P
technologies, make information exchange more scalable.

    (2) Availability

    Due to the real-time interaction between vehicular networks and the
physical world, availability is an important factor in system design.  This
may have a major impact on the safety and efficiency of future highway
systems. The architecture should be robust enough to withstand unexpected
system failures or deliberate attacks.

    (3) Context-Awareness

    As a cyber-physical system, VANET collects information from the
physical world and may conversely impact the physical world. On the one hand,
protocols should be adaptable to real-time environmental changes, including
vehicle density and movement, traffic flow, and road topology changes.  On
the other hand, protocol designers should also consider the possible
consequences the protocol may have on the physical world.

    (4) Security and Privacy

    There is a recent trend of making vehicular on-board computer systems
inter-connectable to other systems. The Ford Sync, for example, connects the
vehicle’s entertainment system to the driver’s cell phone via blue-tooth
technology. In the future, vehicular on-board computers could even be open to
software developers. These trends may have serious implications for security
and privacy due to the cyber physical nature of VANET. Governments and
consumers will have very high expectations of VANET safety and security.

4 Research Challenges
This section discusses research challenges from different network protocol
layers. The unique properties of vehicular networks give rise to a number of
design challenges. These properties also create new opportunities to solve ITS
problems from a different perspective.
 

4.1 Link Layer

In the link layer, the main challenge lies in adapting link layer protocols to
unique vehicular environments and to maximize link layer performance. There
are three major design objectives for link layer protocols: responsiveness,
reliability, and scalability. Link layer protocols are required to be highly
responsive to changes in channel conditions and vehicle mobility, while
reliability and scalability are two requirements critical to safety
applications. A number of traditional link layer strategies, such as lengthy
access point selection, MAC management timeout, and Address Resolution
Protocol (ARP) timeout, have been proven inefficient in highly mobile
environments. They may lead to increased start-up delays, underutilized
bandwidth, or unfair bandwidth allocation. Scalability and reliability are
interrelated issues. Reliable broadcasting has been intensively studied for
vehicular safety applications. The existing approaches include rebroadcasting,
cooperative forwarding, and transmission power adaptation. However,
reliability and scalability remain open-ended issues for safety applications
because both governments and consumers have extremely high expectations for
safety applications.

4.2 Network Layer

In the network layer, the main challenge is to establish a new paradigm for
information dissemination in VANET.  Ad hoc network routing has been
intensively studied in the last decade. In particular, many context-aware
routing protocols—such as Mobility-Centric Data Dissemination Algorithm for
Vehicular Networks (MDDV)[7] and Vehicle-Assisted Data Delivery (VADD) in
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks[8]—have been proposed for VANET. These protocols
significantly improve the packet forwarding performance in vehicular
environments by taking advantage of vehicle mobility, GPS position, and road
layout. They are essentially all packet-based; a packet travels from a source
to a destination untouched throughout the entire process. However, this
packet-based paradigm no longer satisfies application requirements in VANET
from an information-centric perspective. First, for some applications, there
is no definite source and destination, which is necessary for packet-based
routing. Second, information is altered (or combined) throughout the
forwarding process, and this is not a consideration of packet routing.  In a
traffic detection application, every vehicle may generate a traffic report
that can be combined with other reports as it is disseminated.  For all
interested vehicles intended to be the recipients of these reports, there is
no prior knowledge about how many, when, or where these vehicles might be.
Some packet routing approaches such as multicast and geocast can help solve
these issues. However, what is needed is a new paradigm for information
routing—a replacement for packet routing. The new paradigm will enable
information operations such as information generation, aggregation,
dissemination, and invalidation.

4.3 Application Layer

In the application layer, the challenge lies in effectively representing,
discovering, storing, and updating information throughout the network. Naming
and addressing are central problems in vehicular networks. How to index
information from the physical world for efficient information storage and
dissemination remains an unresolved problem. It is envisioned that the
addressing scheme will be a hybrid, multi-level scheme, with context
information playing an important role. The naming and addressing policy has a
significant impact on other system protocols, such as information discovery
and routing. Because vehicles are highly mobile, another challenge is to
dynamically map vehicle IDs to position-based addresses. This problem is
particularly important for applications across the hybrid network
architecture.
ARP/Reverse Address Resolution Protocol (RARP)-like mechanisms can be
implemented in nodes equipped with both DSRC and infrastructure network
interfaces.

    Distributed data management is another challenging issue for VANET,

impacting data replication, data elimination, and cache replacement.
Traditional distributed data management assumes a network is connected with
geographically-distributed servers, which is no longer true for VANET.
Essentially, VANET can be regarded as a large-scale distributed database in
which each vehicle maintains a local part. Vehicles periodically exchange data
to update this global database, and inconsistency cannot be avoided.
Therefore, maintaining a relaxed consistency model with minimal overhead is a
challenge.

5 Information Dissemination
In this section, research demands and challenges from an information-centric
perspective are discussed. VANET can be regarded as an information-centric
system where information is collected and disseminated throughout the network,
and it is important to identify the system’s demands from this perspective.
Information dissemination can be classified into two levels: macroscopic and
microscopic. Two case studies are presented for these levels respectively.
Table 1 lists the major research topics at these two levels and the
representative work on each.

 
 

5.1 Macroscopic Information Dissemination

Macroscopic information dissemination deals with disseminating information to
one node or a group of nodes in a specified geographical area. The destination
of information can be a single specified node in the network, a group of
specified nodes, or even a group of unknown nodes. The objective of
macroscopic information dissemination is to reduce information delivery delay,
reduce delivery overhead (including storage overhead and communication
overhead), and increase the future query success rate (if the destination is
unknown in advance). General research topics for macroscopic information
dissemination include information routing, data caching, and data aggregation.

    Information dissemination can be implemented with or without

infrastructure support. Jedrzej et al[9] proposed  establishing a P2P overlay
network based on cellular network infrastructure. With a reliable connection
to internet infrastructure, vehicles can share, discover, and exchange
information of non-safety applications in a P2P manner. However, service
provided by infrastructure is usually based on paid subscription, which limits
the number of consumers.  Compared with infrastructure service, ad hoc
networks seem to be a more attractive approach. On the other hand, most non-
safety applications do not have strict real-time requirements. A recent trend
has been to study VANET information dissemination in a delay tolerant manner.
Some general purpose DTN routing protocols such as epidemic routing[10] have
been proposed and evaluated.  Proactive approaches[11-12] take advantage of
apriori knowledge of geographical location, connectivity pattern, as well as
control over movement. Some existing DTN routing protocols assume a predefined
source and destination. For example, in Small and Hass’s project[13], a DTN
network was established for wild whale monitoring. A sensor node was mounted
on the back of a whale, and mobility information was delivered to an
infostation hop by hop in a delay-tolerant manner.

    Data caching and aggregation have also been studied in VANET.

    Zhao et al[14] studied the process of distributing information from a

data center into VANETs. Their approach was based on periodical rebroadcasting
and buffering. It is a one-way dissemination from a data center to a group of
vehicles. Lochert et al[15] proposed a hierarchical aggregation scheme that
defines a set of landmarks to calculate travel time. They also proposed a
roadside unit placement algorithm to optimize aggregation.

    Information dissemination, caching, and aggregation have been

individually studied in relation to VANET. However, the delay-tolerant
dissemination problem has been fused into data query, data caching, and data
aggregation issues because, in VANET, for most types of information, there is
no a priori knowledge of the destination vehicles. Any vehicle may generate
and send out a query in the hope that a response is returned by a neighboring
vehicle as soon as possible.

    A new paradigm for information routing needs to be established as an

alternative to packet routing. First, the destination of information routing
must be defined.  The dissemination destination is a virtual concept
constrained by time, space, and vehicles. In other words, the destination
consists of all vehicles which meet the temporal and spatial conditions. There
are two basic dissemination operations: pull and push. For pull, a vehicle
periodically broadcasts its interest and pulls data from other neighboring
vehicles; for push, vehicles intentionally push data to neighboring vehicles
so that other vehicles that may be interested in the data can easily obtain it
in the future. Since the pull operation is limited to one hop at the initial
stage of market penetration, it is more important to devise push strategies.
When devising push strategies, the potential impact to data caching and
aggregation must be taken into account. Heuristic neighbor information (such
as driving direction, speed, frequently visited places, etc.) or even social
networking information can be used to predict and control the dissemination.

5.1.1 In-Network Data Aggregation

This sub-section examines the details of macroscopic information dissemination
through an example of in-network data aggregation. As previously mentioned, in
the near future, every vehicle will be a super sensor, capable of monitoring
its surrounding environment. Each vehicle may generate a traffic report when
the vehicle speed is well below the speed limit. However, it is inefficient
for every vehicle to generate a report and then broadcast it to the entire
network. It is unnecessary to broadcast the speed of individual vehicles on a
road which is a few miles away; drivers expect to know general congestion
information ahead. Actually, traffic reports can be combined as they are
propagating, and the overhead for dissemination can be effectively reduced.
    Figure 3 illustrates an example of report dissemination. Two vehicles A
and B, which are geographically close to each other, generate two traffic
reports. These two reports are intended to be delivered to all vehicles
following behind so that those vehicles can take a detour before encountering
a traffic jam. A report will be duplicated at an intersection, each copy going
in one direction. In this way, a dissemination tree is formed. Since vehicles
A and B may not be within each other’s signal range, one may not know that a
similar report was generated by the other. Instead of being disseminated
across the entire network, these two reports can be merged as they propagate.
In Figure 3, the dotted circle shows the possible aggregation area for these
two reports.

    In order to aggregate the two reports, they must be delivered to the
same vehicle at the same time. For traditional wireless sensor networks,
researchers have proposed a number of structural or semi-structural-based
aggregation schemes involving the creation of a transmission schedule to
ensure reports meet each other at the fork of a routing tree. However, a fixed
routing structure is infeasable in VANETs. Several VANET projects, such as
Self-Organizing Traffic Information System (SOTIS)[16] and TrafficView[17],
use periodic rebroadcasting to collect and redistribute traffic information.
Rebroadcasting is a feasible solution for local information exchange and
dissemination, but it is difficult to scale it to city-wide dissemination.

    Essentially, in-network data aggregation schemes trade off increased

delay for reduced redundancy. When a node receives a report, it introduces a
delay before forwarding it to the next hop so that it may receive another
report for this duration. Structure-based schemes use a transmission schedule
to determine this delay. Rebroadcasting schemes use a fixed delay for
rebroadcasting. If the delay is more adaptive, however, a packet is more
likely to meet other reports. In our previous work[18], intelligent delay
control policies based on local observations were investigated. For example,
suppose a node observes that a report has recently passed by; if the node
receives another report in a short period, it can simply forward it to the
next hop immediately in the hope that it can catch up with a previous one. If
no report has recently passed, a long delay can be applied in the hope that
more reports can be later received by this node. A future reward model is
designed to define the benefits of different delay-control policies, and then
to establish a decision tree to help a vehicle choose an optimal policy from
the perspective of long-term reward. Figure 4 shows the performance of such an
aggregation scheme. Our scheme (CATCHUP) is compared with Randomized
Waiting[19]; the results show that the number of packets can be significantly
reduced as the distance to the report source increases.

    Data aggregation in VANETs has attracted much research attention.

However, issues involving scalability, data representation and processing, and
delay tolerant routing remain unresolved. Among these, scalability is the most
pressing issue. Although a number of data aggregation schemes have been
proposed for VANETs, it is still not clear how scalable these schemes are in
terms of city-wide communication.

5.2 Microscopic Information Dissemination

Microscopic information dissemination deals with information delivery in one
hop or in a few hops. In the initial market penetration stage, a vehicle may
rarely encounter another vehicle or roadside unit. Therefore, increasing the
efficiency of each encounter between vehicles is important.
    A few recent research projects have paid close attention to one-hop
communication in a vehicular environment. Bychkovsky et al studied the
techniques to increase one-hop throughput via open WiFi links.  They
conducted a number of field tests to investigate the performance loss in MAC
association, IP address acquiring, and IP route establishing. Hadaller et al
conducted a 802.11-based one-hop communication experiment and furnished a
detailed experimental analysis. From their experiments, the researchers
identified the underlying causes of throughput loss in existing wireless
access mechanisms. In sum, these works attempt to analyze and improve the link
throughput from the perspective of lower layer protocols (phy, MAC, routing).

    Microscopic information dissemination also deals with local multi-hop

communication. Usually, the main task of local multi-hop communication is to
coordinate local vehicles to disseminate information in a predefined
direction. VADD is a forwarding protocol which takes advantage of traffic
pattern and road topology to  source the best road  for delivering a packet.
MDDV exploits vehicle mobility for information dissemination, and makes
neighboring vehicles collaborate in packet forwarding in order to increase
reliability.  Zhao et al[20] studied throughput improvement gained through
cooperative relaying to a roadside unit.
Because of the short session duration of a mobile-encounter scenario,
efficient management of channel resources is also a practical issue. Chang et
al[21] proposed a scheduling algorithm for downlinks—from a roadside unit to
passing vehicles. Zhang et al[22] proposed another scheduling algorithm which
considers both upload requests and download requests. Yu et al[23] studied the
admission control problem when a roadside unit is  experiencing (or close to
experiencing) overloaded conditions. These studies improve the efficiency of
roadside unit access from different resource allocation perspectives.

    In general, the main challenge in microscopic information dissemination

is how to bind lower layer conditions (mobility, channel, position) and upper
layer application requirements together. From the upper layer perspective, DTN
applications can tolerate information delays and information inaccuracy; from
the lower layer perspective, mobility, channel, and location may change
dramatically in a short period of time. Existing work has studied the one-hop
communication problem with different network protocols. However, there is
still no effective bond between the upper and lower layers.  The bond may
allow us to take advantage of the lower harsh conditions, rather than being
constrained by them.

    Three aspects are considered when designing microscopic information

dissemination protocols.
    (1) Application Requirement 
    DTN applications do not assume a reliable link, but do prioritize data
for transmission. They may specify the information loss tolerance level during
the dissemination process.

    (2) Resource Management 

    Problems include how to schedule lower layer resources (such as
transmission channel and transmission rate); how to schedule upper layer
tasks; and how to allocate resources to ensure fairness.

    (3) Cooperation 

    Here, focus is on cooperation between vehicles within signal range.
Potential techniques include multi-task scheduling, relaying, multi-party
network coding, and others.

5.2.1 Roadside Unit Admission Control

This subsection provides a case study for microscopic information
dissemination. Roadside Units (RSU) play an important role in future ITS. They
are usually deployed at highway ramps or road intersections, and can
communicate with passing vehicles with DSRC technologies. RSUs can provide
these vehicles with a variety of potential services. For example, a passing
vehicle may download digital maps, commercials, and traffic reports from an
RSU. However, an RSU is a sparse resource. In the initial phase of market
penetration, only a limited number of RSUs can be deployed at highway ramps or
major intersections. Even when a vehicle encounters a unit, it may take less
than half a minute to move out of signal range. Moreover, multiple vehicles
may concurrently compete for services from the RSU. Therefore, it is important
to efficiently manage RSU access.

    Transmission integrity is also important for RSU access, since the
services provided may be time or location sensitive. If downloading a task
like a digital map or traffic report cannot be completed before the vehicle
moves out of signal range, the downloaded part would be meaningless, not to
mention a waste of bandwidth. Admission control is a potential approach to
guaranteeing transmission integrity. The task of admission control is to
determine whether to admit a new upload or download task. Once a task has been
admitted, a transmission schedule is calculated to guarantee completion of the
task.

    Admission control has been the subject of intensive study. Traditional
admission control schemes mainly focus on long-term sessions; for example,
VoIP and multimedia services. Some real-time systems simply characterize
transmission tasks by average rate, peak rate, or burst size. However,
roadside unit access is mainly focused on short sessions, and the transmission
rate for a moving vehicle may vary dramatically. A dedicated admission control
scheme is therefore desirable for roadside unit access.

    In our previous work, an admission control scheme was proposed  for
roadside unit access. The scheme calculates a transmission schedule for all
tasks (including current and new tasks) based on a channel prediction model
and a vehicle mobility model. If a feasible schedule is found, new tasks will
be admitted; otherwise, new tasks will be rejected to guarantee the success of
current tasks.  The problem was treated as a linear-programming optimization
problem and a set of algorithms were designed to calculate the bandwidth
allocation schedule. All concurrent transmission tasks share the bandwidth
according to the schedule, thereby maximizing the success rate of these
tasks.  In a NS2-based simulation, our scheme was compared with a baseline
admission control method. The baseline method allocated bandwidth based on a
minimum required rate. Figure 5 demonstrates that the RSUAC scheme effectively
reduced the percentage of failed tasks even when the workload (number of tasks
per vehicle) increased.

6 Conclusions
VANET is a promising area for future ITS, and has the potential to become the
largest ad hoc network in history. In the past few years, it has attracted
much attention from academia, industry, and government. However, there are
fundamental issues that remain unresolved.  Better paradigms are needed for
information dissemination and distributed data management. Undoubtedly, the
number of research contributions will continue to increase in the near future.

 
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Bo Yu received his doctoral degree from the department of Computer Science,

Fudan University, China.  Currently, he is a post-doc researcher in Wayne
State University, USA. His research interests include vehicular Ad hoc
networks, wireless sensor networks, and mobile Ad hoc networks.

Chengzhong Xu received a PhD degree from the University of Hongkong in 1993.

He is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Director of
Cloud and Internet Computing Laboratory and Sun’s Center of Excellence in
Open Source Computing and Applications at Wayne State University. His research
interests include distributed and parallel computing and wireless embedded
systems. He has published two books and more than 150 papers and chaired
numerous international conferences and workshops in these areas.