A survey on vehicular communication for cooperative truck platooning application

Platooning is an application where a group of vehicles move one after each other in close proximity, acting jointly as a single physical system. The scope of platooning is to improve safety, reduce fuel consumption, and increase road use efficiency. Even if conceived several decades ago as a concept, based on the new progress in automation and vehicular networking platooning has attracted particular attention in the latest years and is expected to become of common implementation in the next future, at least for trucks.The platoon system is the result of a combination of multiple disciplines, from transportation, to automation, to electronics, to telecommunications. In this survey, we consider the platooning, and more specifically the platooning of trucks, from the point of view of wireless communications. Wireless communications are indeed a key element, since they allow the information to propagate within the convoy with an almost negligible delay and really making all vehicles acting as one. Scope of this paper is to present a comprehensive survey on connected vehicles for the platooning application, starting with an overview of the projects that are driving the development of this technology, followed by a brief overview of the current and upcoming vehicular networking architecture and standards, by a review of the main open issues related to wireless communications applied to platooning, and a discussion of security threats and privacy concerns. The survey will conclude with a discussion of the main areas that we consider still open and that can drive future research directions.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Comparison of Radio Frequency and Visible Light Propagation Channels for Vehicular Communications

Recent research has shown that both radio and visible light waves can be used to enable communications in highly dynamic vehicular environments. However, the roles of these two technologies and how they interact with each other in future vehicular communication systems remain unclear. Understanding the propagation characteristics is an essential step in investigating the benefits and shortcomings of each technology. To this end, we discuss salient properties of radio and visible light propagation channels, including radiation pattern, path loss modeling, noise and interference, and channel time variation. Comparison of these properties provides an important insight that the two communication channels can complement each other’s capabilities in terms of coverage and reliability, thus better satisfying the diverse requirements of future cooperative intelligent transportation systems

Real time collision warning system in the context of vehicle-to-vehicle data exchange based on drivings behaviours analysis

Worldwide injuries in vehicle accidents have been on the rise in recent years, mainly due to driver error regardless of technological innovations and advancements for vehicle safety. Consequently, there is a need for a reliable-real time warning system that can alert drivers of a potential collision. Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) is an extensive area of ongoing research and development which has started to revolutionize the driving experience. Driving behaviour is a subject of extensive research which gains special attention due to the relationship between speeding behaviour and crashes as drivers who engage in frequent and extreme speeding behaviour are overinvolved in crashes. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) set guidelines on how different vehicle automation levels may reduce vehicle crashes and how the use of on-board short-range sensors coupled with V2V technologies can help facilitate communication among vehicles. Based on the previous works, it can be seen that the assessment of drivers’ behaviours using their trajectory data is a fresh and open research field. Most studies related to driving behaviours in terms of acceleration�deceleration are evaluated at the laboratory scale using experimental results from actual vehicles. Towards this end, a five-stage methodology for a new collision warning system in the context of V2V based on driving behaviours has been designed. Real-time V2V hardware for data collection purposes was developed. Driving behaviour was analyzed in different timeframes prior obtained from actual driving behaviour in an urban environment collected from OBD-II adapter and GPS data logger of an instrumented vehicle. By measuring the in-vehicle accelerations, it is possible to categorize the driving behaviour into four main classes based on real-time experiments: safe drivers, normal, aggressive, and dangerous drivers. When the vehicle is in a risk situation, the system based on NRF24L01+PA/LNA, GPS, and OBD-II will pass a signal to the driver using a dedicated LCD and LED light signal. The driver can instantly decide to make the vehicle in a safe mood, effectively avoid the happening of vehicle accidents. The proposed solution provides two main functions: (1) the detection of the dangerous vehicles involved in the road, and (2) the display of a message informing the driver if it is safe or unsafe to pass. System performance was evaluated to ensure that it achieved the primary objective of improving road safety in the extreme behaviour of the driver in question either the safest (or the least aggressive) and the most unsafe (or the most aggressive). The proposed methodology has retained some advantages for other literature studies because of the simultaneous use of speed, acceleration, and vehicle location. The V2V based on driving behaviour experiments shows the effectiveness of the selected approach predicts behaviour with an accuracy of over 87% in sixty-four real-time scenarios presented its capability to detect behaviour and provide a warning to nearby drivers. The system failed detection only in few times when the receiving vehicle missed data due to high speed during the test as well as the distances between the moving vehicles, the data was not received correctly since the power transmitted, the frequency range of the signals, the antenna relative positions, and the number of in-range vehicles are of interest for the V2V test scenarios. The latter result supports the conclusion that warnings that efficiently and quickly transmit their information may be better when driver are under stress or time pressure

Single and Multi-Hop Vehicular Visible and Infrared Light Communications

Visible light communications (VLC) have been proposed as a complementary technology in vehicular networks due to its several merits including high security, high scalability than RF technology. Notably, the RF technology established for vehicular networks best known as the dedicated short-range communications, supports many applications but doubts still exist on the capability of this technology to meet the low latency (where not more than 20 ms is required for pre-crash sensing and cooperative collision mitigation) and high reliability requirements in intelligent transport systems (ITS), when considering issues such as network outages as well as security issues. Of interest is the wide increase in the use of light emitting diode (LED)-based vehicle and traffic lights, and cameras in vehicles (rear and dashcams), traffic and security cameras, hence opening more opportunities for the VLC technology as part of ITS. Remarkably, camera-based VLC (i.e., optical camera communications) offers even further capabilities such as vehicle localization, motion and scene detection and pattern recognition. However, the VLC system has few challenges that needs addressing for the practical implementation of this technology as part of ITS. Consequently, this thesis focuses on addressing the key challenges and proposing novel technical analytical and experimental solutions. Firstly, increasing the robustness to sunlight induced noise is one of the major challenges in vehicular VLC, hence this thesis proposes an infrared (IR) transmission, as the amount of solar irradiance is lesser in the IR band than in the visible band. Performance of the proposed scheme is validated through numerical simulations with realistic emulated sunlight noise from empirical measurement. Investigations on the effects of turbulence with aperture averaging and fog on vehicular VLC is also carried out via experiments. Secondly, increasing the communication range is another major challenge, consequently the feasibility of using different vehicle taillights (TLs) as the VLC transmitter are evaluated via simulations based on empirical measurements of the radiation characteristics and transmit powers of the TLs. Results obtained indicate that, only a very low link span of 89 m at the forward error correction (FEC) bit error rate (BER) limit of 3.8 × 10-3, compared to 4.5, 5.4, and 6.3 m for the BMW vehicle-based TL at data rates of 10, 6, and 2 Mbps are achieved under realistic sunlight conditions. While, to increase the communication distance of camera-based VLC links, reducing the spatial bandwidth of the camera in its out of focus regions is proposed, mathematically analysed, and experimentally demonstrated where up to a 400 m link span at a 100 % success reception rate is achieved at a data rate of 800 bps, which is the longest so far reported. Relay-assisted links are also investigated using amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying schemes under the emulated sunlight noise. A mathematical and simulation-based system model is developed, where different transmitter/receiver geometries are considered and AF and DF schemes. Results obtained via simulations shows that the DF scheme is a suitable candidate for vehicular VLC connectivity under emulated sunlight noise, offering at the FEC BER limit of 3.8 × 10-3 up to 150 % increase in the link distance by the end of the 2nd hop. Proof of concept experimental demonstration of AF and DF schemes for vehicular VLC are also carried out showing that DF is the preferred option. Moreover, insights are provided into the impact of various system parameters on the relay-assisted links. Finally, increasing the mobility of the vehicular VLC system is another major challenge, hence analysis on the required angular field of view (AFOV) for vehicular links considering necessary geometry parameters is investigated. Mathematical expressions to determine the required AFOV based on key system parameters are also derived. Furthermore, the relevance of the choice of the receiver parameters for an enhanced AFOV is also analysed, consequently a means to mitigate the effects of beam spot offset induced power losses at the photodiode caused by the misalignment of the transmitter and imaging receiver is proposed

Intelligent and bandwidth-efficient medium access control protocols for IEEE 802.11p-based Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) technology aims to enable safer and more sophisticated transportation via the spontaneous formation of Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). This type of wireless networks allows the exchange of kinematic and other data among vehicles, for the primary purpose of safer and more efficient driving, as well as efficient traffic management and other third-party services. Their infrastructure-less, unbounded nature allows the formation of dense networks that present a channel sharing issue, which is harder to tackle than in conventional WLANs. This thesis focuses on optimising channel access strategies, which is important for the efficient usage of the available wireless bandwidth and the successful deployment of VANETs. To start with, the default channel access control method for V2V is evaluated hardware via modifying the appropriate wireless interface Linux driver to enable finer on-the-fly control of IEEE 802.11p access control layer parameters. More complex channel sharing scenarios are evaluated via simulations and findings on the behaviour of the access control mechanism are presented. A complete channel sharing efficiency assessment is conducted, including throughput, fairness and latency measurements. A new IEEE 802.11p-compatible Q-Learning-based access control approach that improves upon the studied protocol is presented. The stations feature algorithms that “learn” how to act optimally in VANETs in order to maximise their achieved packet delivery and minimise bandwidth wastage. The feasibility of Q-Learning to be used as the base of selflearning protocols for IEEE 802.11p-based V2V communication access control in dense environments is investigated in terms of parameter tuning, necessary time of exploration, achieving latency requirements, scaling, multi-hop and accommodation of simultaneous applications. Additionally, the novel Collection Contention Estimation (CCE) mechanism for Q-Learning-based access control is presented. By embedding it on the Q-Learning agents, faster convergence, higher throughput, better service separation and short-term fairness are achieved in simulated network deployments. The acquired new insights on the network performance of the proposed algorithms can provide precise guidelines for efficient designs of practical, reliable, fair and ultra-low latency V2V communication systems for dense topologies. These results can potentially have an impact across a range of related areas, including various types of wireless networks and resource allocation for these, network protocol and transceiver design as well as QLearning applicability and considerations for correct use

Mobile Oriented Future Internet (MOFI)

This Special Issue consists of seven papers that discuss how to enhance mobility management and its associated performance in the mobile-oriented future Internet (MOFI) environment. The first two papers deal with the architectural design and experimentation of mobility management schemes, in which new schemes are proposed and real-world testbed experimentations are performed. The subsequent three papers focus on the use of software-defined networks (SDN) for effective service provisioning in the MOFI environment, together with real-world practices and testbed experimentations. The remaining two papers discuss the network engineering issues in newly emerging mobile networks, such as flying ad-hoc networks (FANET) and connected vehicular networks