Internet of Vehicles and Real-Time Optimization Algorithms: Concepts for Vehicle Networking in Smart Cities

Achieving sustainable freight transport and citizens’ mobility operations in modern cities are becoming critical issues for many governments. By analyzing big data streams generated through IoT devices, city planners now have the possibility to optimize traffic and mobility patterns. IoT combined with innovative transport concepts as well as emerging mobility modes (e.g., ridesharing and carsharing) constitute a new paradigm in sustainable and optimized traffic operations in smart cities. Still, these are highly dynamic scenarios, which are also subject to a high uncertainty degree. Hence, factors such as real-time optimization and re-optimization of routes, stochastic travel times, and evolving customers’ requirements and traffic status also have to be considered. This paper discusses the main challenges associated with Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and vehicle networking scenarios, identifies the underlying optimization problems that need to be solved in real time, and proposes an approach to combine the use of IoV with parallelization approaches. To this aim, agile optimization and distributed machine learning are envisaged as the best candidate algorithms to develop efficient transport and mobility systems

Federated Learning in Intelligent Transportation Systems: Recent Applications and Open Problems

Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) have been fueled by the rapid development of communication technologies, sensor technologies, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Nonetheless, due to the dynamic characteristics of the vehicle networks, it is rather challenging to make timely and accurate decisions of vehicle behaviors. Moreover, in the presence of mobile wireless communications, the privacy and security of vehicle information are at constant risk. In this context, a new paradigm is urgently needed for various applications in dynamic vehicle environments. As a distributed machine learning technology, federated learning (FL) has received extensive attention due to its outstanding privacy protection properties and easy scalability. We conduct a comprehensive survey of the latest developments in FL for ITS. Specifically, we initially research the prevalent challenges in ITS and elucidate the motivations for applying FL from various perspectives. Subsequently, we review existing deployments of FL in ITS across various scenarios, and discuss specific potential issues in object recognition, traffic management, and service providing scenarios. Furthermore, we conduct a further analysis of the new challenges introduced by FL deployment and the inherent limitations that FL alone cannot fully address, including uneven data distribution, limited storage and computing power, and potential privacy and security concerns. We then examine the existing collaborative technologies that can help mitigate these challenges. Lastly, we discuss the open challenges that remain to be addressed in applying FL in ITS and propose several future research directions

Flexible Global Aggregation and Dynamic Client Selection for Federated Learning in Internet of Vehicles

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative and privacy-preserving training of machine learning models within the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) realm. While FL effectively tackles privacy concerns, it also imposes significant resource requirements. In traditional FL, trained models are transmitted to a central server for global aggregation, typically in the cloud. This approach often leads to network congestion and bandwidth limitations when numerous devices communicate with the same server. The need for Flexible Global Aggregation and Dynamic Client Selection in FL for the IoV arises from the inherent characteristics of IoV environments. These include diverse and distributed data sources, varying data quality, and limited communication resources. By employing dynamic client selection, we can prioritize relevant and high-quality data sources, enhancing model accuracy. To address this issue, we propose an FL framework that selects global aggregation nodes dynamically rather than a single fixed aggregator. Flexible global aggregation ensures efficient utilization of limited network resources while accommodating the dynamic nature of IoV data sources. This approach optimizes both model performance and resource allocation, making FL in IoV more effective and adaptable. The selection of the global aggregation node is based on workload and communication speed considerations. Additionally, our framework overcomes the constraints associated with network, computational, and energy resources in the IoV environment by implementing a client selection algorithm that dynamically adjusts participants according to predefined parameters. Our approach surpasses Federated Averaging (FedAvg) and Hierarchical FL (HFL) regarding energy consumption, delay, and accuracy, yielding superior results