Energy Efficient Route Planning Using VANET

One of the key challenges in conducting dynamic route planning is the process of collecting and disseminating instantaneous travel data in real time. Recent studies are evaluating VANET (Vehicular Ad Hoc Network) and its associated WAVE (Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment) standards to facilitate this process. In these studies, travel data accumulated from vehicle OBUs (on board unit) are shared with other vehicles over DSRC (dedicated short- range communication) medium using centralized or distributed approach. In most studies, data collection and dissemination process are not scalable enough for high density traffic environment. Specifically, with a centralized approach, if traffic management center (TMC) or Road Side Unit (RSU) performs route planning for vehicles, there will be many bidirectional communications between the centralized entity and vehicles, leading to higher channel congestion in heavy traffic areas. With a distributed approach, information shared by other vehicles might not be useful or pertinent for some vehicles, leading to wastage of channel bandwidth. Methods used for data collection also need to be intelligent to count in nontraditional circumstances to achieve accuracy. In this thesis, we have proposed a three tiered architecture for data collection, analysis and dissemination. In addition, 1) we demonstrated the concept of queuing delay at intersection for travel time calculation and developed a hybrid metric that considers average travel time and occupancy rate, 2) we offload the computation of route planning to vehicle OBUs and 3) we developed an algorithm that determines the area of propagation for data that needs to be disseminated. We evaluated the performance of our approach progressively using VEINS, SUMO and OMNET++ simulators

Capacity analysis in different systems exploiting mobility of VANETs

Improving road safety and traffic efficiency has been a long-term endeavor for not only government but also automobile industry and academia. After the U.S. Federal Communication Commission (FCC) allocated a 75 MHz spectrum at 5.9 GHz for vehicular communications, the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), as an instantiation of the mobile ad hoc network (MANET) with much higher node mobility, opens a new door to combat the road fatalities. In VANETs, a variety of applications ranging from safety related (e.g. emergency report, collision warning) to non-safety-related (e.g. infotainment and entertainment) can be enabled by vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-roadside (V2R) communications. However, the flourish of VANET still hinges fully understanding and managing the challenges that the public concerns, for example, capacity and connectivity issues due to the high mobility of vehicles. In this thesis, we investigate how vehicle mobility can impact the performance in three important VANET-involved systems, i.e., pure VANET, VANET-enhanced intelligent transportation systems (ITS), and fast electric vehicle (EV) charging systems. First, in pure VANET, our work shows that the network data-traffic can be balanced and the network throughput can be improved with the help of the vehicle mobility differentiation. Furthermore, leveraging vehicular communications of VANETs, the mobility-aware real-time path planning can be designed to smooth the vehicle traffic in an ITS, through which the traffic congestion in urban scenarios can be effectively relieved. In addition, with the consideration of the range anxiety caused by mobility, coordinated charging can provide efficient charging plans for electric vehicles (EVs) to improve the overall energy utilization while preventing an electric power system from overloading. To this end, we try to answer the following questions: Q1) How to utilize mobility characteristics of vehicles to derive the achievable asymptotic throughput capacity in pure VANETs? Q2) How to design path planning for mobile vehicles to maximize spatial utility based on mobility differentiation, in order to approach vehicle-traffic capacity in a VANET-enhanced ITS? Q3) How to develop the charging strategies based on mobility of electric vehicles to improve the electricity utility, in order to approach load capacities of charging stations in VANET-enhanced smart grid? To achieve the first objective, we consider the unique features of VANETs and derive the scaling law of VANETs throughput capacity in the data uploading scenario. We show that in both free-space propagation and non-free-space propagation environments, the achievable throughput capacity of individual vehicle scales as $\Theta (\frac{1}{{\log n}}) with$n$denoting the population of a set of homogenous vehicles in the network. To achieve the second objective, we first establish a VANET-enhanced ITS, which incorporates VANETs to enable real-time communications among vehicles, road side units (RSUs), and a vehicle-traffic server in an efficient way. Then, we propose a real-time path planning algorithm, which not only improves the overall spatial utilization of a road network but also reduces average vehicle travel cost for avoiding vehicles from getting stuck in congestion. To achieve the third objective, we investigate a smart grid involved EV fast charging system, with enhanced communication capabilities, i.e., a VANET-enhanced smart grid. It exploits VANETs to support real-time communications among RSUs and highly mobile EVs for real-time vehicle mobility information collection or charging decision dispatch. Then, we propose a mobility-aware coordinated charging strategy for EVs, which not only improves the overall energy utilization while avoiding power system overloading, but also addresses the range anxieties of individual EVs by reducing the average travel cost. In summary, the analysis developed and the scaling law derived in$Q1$of this thesis is practical and fundamental to reveal the relationship between the mobility of vehicles and the network performance in VANETs. And the strategies proposed in$Q2$and$Q3$ of the thesis are meaningful in exploiting/leveraging the vehicle mobility differentiation to improve the system performance in order to approach the corresponding capacities