  The rapid increase of vehicular traffic and congestion on the highways began
hampering the safe and efficient movement of traffic. Consequently, year by
year, we see the ascending rate of car accidents and casualties in most of the
countries. Therefore, exploiting the new technologies, e.g. wireless sensor
networks, is required as a solution of reduction of these saddening and
reprehensible statistics. This has motivated us to propose a novel and
comprehensive system to utilize Wireless Sensor Networks for vehicular
networks. We coin the vehicular network employing wireless Sensor networks as
Vehicular Ad Hoc and Sensor Network, or VASNET in short. The proposed VASNET is
particularly for highway traffic .VASNET is a self-organizing Ad Hoc and sensor
network comprised of a large number of sensor nodes. In VASNET there are two
kinds of sensor nodes, some are embedded on the vehicles-vehicular nodes- and
others are deployed in predetermined distances besides the highway road, known
as Road Side Sensor nodes (RSS). The vehicular nodes are used to sense the
velocity of the vehicle for instance. We can have some Base Stations (BS) such
as Police Traffic Station, Firefighting Group and Rescue Team. The base
stations may be stationary or mobile. VASNET provides capability of wireless
communication between vehicular nodes and stationary nodes, to increase safety
and comfort for vehicles on the highway roads. In this paper we explain main
fundamentals and challenges of VASNET.
