VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving

SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks

The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework, communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services, providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner. According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologie

Future RAN architecture: SD-RAN through a general-purpose processing platform

In this article, we identify and study the potential of an integrated deployment solution for energy-efficient cellular networks combining the strengths of two very active current research themes: 1) software-defined radio access networks (SD-RANs) and 2) decoupled signaling and data transmissions, or beyond cellular green generation (BCG2) architecture, for enhanced energy efficiency. While SD-RAN envisions a decoupled centralized control plane and data-forwarding plane for flexible control, the BCG2 architecture calls for decoupling coverage from the capacity and coverage provided through an always-on low-power signaling node for a larger geographical area; the capacity is catered by various on-demand data nodes for maximum energy efficiency. In this article, we show that a combined approach that brings both specifications together can not only achieve greater benefits but also facilitate faster realization of both technologies. We propose the idea and design of a signaling controller that acts as a signaling node to provide always-on coverage, consuming low power, and at the same time host the control plane functions for the SDRAN through a general-purpose processing platform. The phantom cell concept is also a similar idea where a normal macrocell provides interference control to densely deployed small cells, although our initial results show that the integrated architecture has a much greater potential for energy savings than phantom cells