Hierarchical wireless framework for real-time collaborative generation and distribution of telemetry data

This project introduces a novel multidisciplinary approach combining Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks and Granular Computing, to the data processing and information generation problem in large urban traffic systems. It addresses the challenge of realtime information generation and dissemination in such systems by designing and investigating a hierarchical real-time information framework. The research work is complemented by designing and developing a simulator for such a system, which provides a simulation environment for the model developed. The proposed multidisciplinary hierarchical real-time information processing and dissemination system framework utilises results from two different areas of study, which are Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETS) and Granular Computing concepts. Furthermore, a new geographically constrained VANET topology for information generation is proposed, simulated and investigated

Improvements to traffic flow in high pollution scenarios in Valencia

[ES] Los atascos son la principal causa de la contaminación vehicular, que al mismo tiempo es uno de los principales problemas de muchas grandes áreas metropolitanas, y las administraciones municipales buscan métodos eficaces para mejorar la calidad de vida de los ciudadanos, especialmente en las zonas céntricas y los lugares sensibles a la contaminación, como hospitales o escuelas. Uno de los métodos adoptados recientemente es cerrar estas zonas al tráfico. Sin embargo, el impacto de estos métodos no se ha estudiado en profundidad. En este trabajo buscamos mejorar la fluidez del tráfico en la ciudad de Valencia cuando se limita el tráfico por razones medioambientales, concretamente debido a un escenario de alta contaminación. En concreto, analizamos el impacto de cortar todas las calles de un distrito importante (Ciutat Vella) para evitar la contaminación en esa zona. Posteriormente, mostramos cómo nuestro algoritmo de enrutamiento propuesto es capaz de redirigir el tráfico por la ciudad sin tener problemas de atascos asociados a este corte. Además, determinamos cómo varían las emisiones totales de los vehículos en la ciudad debido a las restricciones de tráfico aplicadas. Los resultados experimentales muestran que, incluso cerrando todas las calles del distrito, los índices de contaminación disminuyen entre un 2,5 y un 4%, lo que nos hace reflexionar positivamente sobre la aplicabilidad y la eficacia de estos métodos al utilizar nuestro sistema de elección de rutas.[EN] Traffic jams are the main cause of vehicular pollution, which at the same time are one of the main problems in many large metropolitan areas, and municipal administrations are looking for effective methods to improve the quality of life of citizens, especially in downtown areas and pollution-sensitive sites such as hospitals or schools. One of the methods recently adopted is to close these areas to traffic. However, the impact of these methods has not been studied in depth. In this paper we seek to improve traffic flow in the city of Valencia when traffic is limited for environmental reasons, specifically due to a high pollution scenario. In particular, we analyze the impact of cutting all streets in a major district (Ciutat Vella) to avoid pollution in that area. Afterward, we show how our proposed routing algorithm is able to reroute traffic throughout the city without having traffic jam problems associated with this cut. In addition, we determine how the total vehicle emissions in the city vary due to the applied traffic restrictions. Experimental results show that, even by closing all streets in the district, pollution rates decrease by 2.5-4%, which makes us reflect positively on the applicability and effectiveness of these methods when using our route choice system.Padrón Pérez, JD. (2021). Improvements to traffic flow in high pollution scenarios in Valencia. Universitat Politècnica de València. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/173156TFG

Novel Internet of Vehicles Approaches for Smart Cities

Smart cities are the domain where many electronic devices and sensors transmit data via the Internet of Vehicles concept. The purpose of deploying many sensors in cities is to provide an intelligent environment and a good quality of life. However, different challenges still appear in smart cities such as vehicular traffic congestion, air pollution, and wireless channel communication aspects. Therefore, in order to address these challenges, this thesis develops approaches for vehicular routing, wireless channel congestion alleviation, and traffic estimation. A new traffic congestion avoidance approach has been developed in this thesis based on the simulated annealing and TOPSIS cost function. This approach utilizes data such as the traffic average travel speed from the Internet of Vehicles. Simulation results show that the developed approach improves the traffic performance for the Sheffield the scenario in the presence of congestion by an overall average of 19.22% in terms of travel time, fuel consumption and CO2 emissions as compared to other algorithms. In contrast, transmitting a large amount of data among the sensors leads to a wireless channel congestion problem. This affects the accuracy of transmitted information due to the packets loss and delays time. This thesis proposes two approaches based on a non-cooperative game theory to alleviate the channel congestion problem. Therefore, the congestion control problem is formulated as a non-cooperative game. A proof of the existence of a unique Nash equilibrium is given. The performance of the proposed approaches is evaluated on the highway and urban testing scenarios. This thesis also addresses the problem of missing data when sensors are not available or when the Internet of Vehicles connection fails to provide measurements in smart cities. Two approaches based on l1 norm minimization and a relevance vector machine type optimization are proposed. The performance of the developed approaches has been tested involving simulated and real data scenarios

Exploiting resource contention in highly mobile environments and its application to vehicular ad-hoc networks

As network resources are shared between many users, resource management must be a key part of any communication system as it is needed to provide seamless communication and to ensure that applications and servers receive their required Quality-of-Service. However, mobile environments also need to consider handover issues. Furthermore, in a highly mobile environment, traditional reactive approaches to handover are inadequate and thus proactive techniques have been investigated. Recent research in proactive handover techniques, defined two key parameters: Time Before Handover and Network Dwell Time for a mobile node in any given networking topology. Using this approach, it is possible to enhance resource management in common networks using probabilistic mechanisms because it is possible to express contention for resources in terms of: No Contention, Partial Contention and Full Contention. This proactive approach is further enhanced by the use of a contention queue to detect contention between incoming requests and those waiting for service. This paper therefore presents a new methodology to support proactive resource allocation for future networks such as Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks. The proposed approach has been applied to a vehicular testbed and results are presented that show that this approach can improve overall network performance in mobile heterogeneous environments

Street Smart in 5G : Vehicular Applications, Communication, and Computing

Recent advances in information technology have revolutionized the automotive industry, paving the way for next-generation smart vehicular mobility. Specifically, vehicles, roadside units, and other road users can collaborate to deliver novel services and applications that leverage, for example, big vehicular data and machine learning. Relatedly, fifth-generation cellular networks (5G) are being developed and deployed for low-latency, high-reliability, and high bandwidth communications. While 5G adjacent technologies such as edge computing allow for data offloading and computation at the edge of the network thus ensuring even lower latency and context-awareness. Overall, these developments provide a rich ecosystem for the evolution of vehicular applications, communications, and computing. Therefore in this work, we aim at providing a comprehensive overview of the state of research on vehicular computing in the emerging age of 5G and big data. In particular, this paper highlights several vehicular applications, investigates their requirements, details the enabling communication technologies and computing paradigms, and studies data analytics pipelines and the integration of these enabling technologies in response to application requirements.Peer reviewe

VANET-based optimization of infotainment and traffic efficiency vehicular services

The design, standardization and future deployment of vehicular communications systems have been driven so far by safety applications. There are two more aspects of the vehicular networking that have increased their importance in the last years: infotainment and traffic efficiency, as they can improve drivers’ experience, making vehicular communications systems more attractive to end-users. In this thesis we propose optimization mechanisms for both types of vehicular services. Infotainment services are related to the provision of classic IP applications, like browsing, reading e-mail or using social networks. Traffic efficiency services are those accessing new capabilities to the car-navigation systems, aiming at optimizing the usage of road infrastructures, reducing travel times and therefore minimizing the ecological footprint. Bringing infotainment services to the vehicular environment requires to comply with standard protocols and mechanisms that allow heterogeneous networks to be interconnected in the Internet. There are three main functionalities that have to be provided: i) address autoconfiguration, ii) efficient routing and iii) mobility management. Regarding infotainment services, this thesis proposes mechanisms tackling the abovenamed aspects: an overhearing technique to improve an already standardized address autoconfiguration protocol; a tree-based routing algorithm especially tailored for vehicleto- Internet communications and an optimized mobility management approach for vehicular environments. Regarding traffic efficiency, this thesis proposes two algorithms that make use of vehicular communication techniques to monitor and forecast short-term traffic conditions. We first improved our knowledge on drivers’ behavior by analyzing real vehicular data traces, and proposes a mixture model for the vehicles interarrival time. This outcome was used for validating the proposed infotainment optimization as well. All the algorithms and analytical models described in this thesis have been validated by simulations and/or implementations using standard hardware. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------El diseño, normalización y futuro despliegue de los sistemas de comunicación vehiculares han sido principalmente impulsados hasta el momento por las aplicaciones de seguridad vial. Hay dos aspectos adicionales de las redes vehiculares que han visto crecer su relevancia en los últimos años: los servicios de Infotainment y los de eficiencia del tráfico. Estos servicios pueden mejorar la experiencia de los conductores y hacer que los sistemas de comunicación vehiculares resulten más atractivos para los usuarios finales. En esta tesis, se proponen mecanismos de optimización para ambos tipos de servicios vehiculares. Los servicios de Infotainment están relacionados con la provisión de las clásicas aplicaciones IP tales como, navegar, acceder al correo electrónico, o a las redes sociales. Los servicios de eficiencia de tráfico permiten añadir nuevas funcionalidades a los sistemas de navegación con los objetivos de: optimizar el uso de las infraestructuras viarias, reducir los tiempos de viaje y consecuentemente, minimizar el impacto ambiental. Acceder a los servicios de Infotainment desde redes vehiculares conlleva cumplir con los protocolos y mecanismos estandarizados que permiten la interconexión de redes heterogéneas a Internet. Hay tres funcionalidades principales que tienen que ser proporcionadas: configuración automática de direcciones, encaminamiento eficaz y gestión de la movilidad. Esta tesis propone mecanismos para hacer frente a los tres aspectos mencionados: una técnica basada en overhearing que mejora un protocolo de configuración automática de direcciones ya estandarizado, un algoritmo de encaminamiento basado en árboles especialmente diseñado para las comunicaciones desde el vehículo a Internet y, un algoritmo de gestión de la movilidad optimizado para entornos vehiculares. En cuanto a los servicios de eficiencia de tráfico, esta tesis propone dos algoritmos que utilizando las técnicas de comunicación vehículo a vehículo permiten monitorizar y pronosticar a corto plazo las condiciones en el tráfico, como es el caso de posibles atascos. Todos los algoritmos y modelos analíticos descritos en esta tesis han sido validados a través de simulaciones y/o implementaciones usando hardware estándar

From MANET to people-centric networking: Milestones and open research challenges

In this paper, we discuss the state of the art of (mobile) multi-hop ad hoc networking with the aim to present the current status of the research activities and identify the consolidated research areas, with limited research opportunities, and the hot and emerging research areas for which further research is required. We start by briefly discussing the MANET paradigm, and why the research on MANET protocols is now a cold research topic. Then we analyze the active research areas. Specifically, after discussing the wireless-network technologies, we analyze four successful ad hoc networking paradigms, mesh networks, opportunistic networks, vehicular networks, and sensor networks that emerged from the MANET world. We also present an emerging research direction in the multi-hop ad hoc networking field: people centric networking, triggered by the increasing penetration of the smartphones in everyday life, which is generating a people-centric revolution in computing and communications

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Being infrastructure-less and without central administration control, wireless ad-hoc networking is playing a more and more important role in extending the coverage of traditional wireless infrastructure (cellular networks, wireless LAN, etc). This book includes state-of the-art techniques and solutions for wireless ad-hoc networks. It focuses on the following topics in ad-hoc networks: vehicular ad-hoc networks, security and caching, TCP in ad-hoc networks and emerging applications. It is targeted to provide network engineers and researchers with design guidelines for large scale wireless ad hoc networks

Road Traffic Congestion Analysis Via Connected Vehicles

La congestion routière est un état particulier de mobilité où les temps de déplacement augmentent et de plus en plus de temps est passé dans le véhicule. En plus d’être une expérience très stressante pour les conducteurs, la congestion a également un impact négatif sur l’environnement et l’économie. Dans ce contexte, des pressions sont exercées sur les autorités afin qu’elles prennent des mesures décisives pour améliorer le flot du trafic sur le réseau routier. En améliorant le flot, la congestion est réduite et la durée totale de déplacement des véhicules est réduite. D’une part, la congestion routière peut être récurrente, faisant référence à la congestion qui se produit régulièrement. La congestion non récurrente (NRC), quant à elle, dans un réseau urbain, est principalement causée par des incidents, des zones de construction, des événements spéciaux ou des conditions météorologiques défavorables. Les opérateurs d’infrastructure surveillent le trafic sur le réseau mais sont contraints à utiliser le moins de ressources possibles. Cette contrainte implique que l’état du trafic ne peut pas être mesuré partout car il n’est pas réaliste de déployer des équipements sophistiqués pour assurer la collecte précise des données de trafic et la détection en temps réel des événements partout sur le réseau routier. Alors certains emplacements où le flot de trafic doit être amélioré ne sont pas surveillés car ces emplacements varient beaucoup. D’un autre côté, de nombreuses études sur la congestion routière ont été consacrées aux autoroutes plutôt qu’aux régions urbaines, qui sont pourtant beaucoup plus susceptibles d’être surveillées par les autorités de la circulation. De plus, les systèmes actuels de collecte de données de trafic n’incluent pas la possibilité d’enregistrer des informations détaillées sur les événements qui surviennent sur la route, tels que les collisions, les conditions météorologiques défavorables, etc. Aussi, les études proposées dans la littérature ne font que détecter la congestion ; mais ce n’est pas suffisant, nous devrions être en mesure de mieux caractériser l’événement qui en est la cause. Les agences doivent comprendre quelle est la cause qui affecte la variabilité de flot sur leurs installations et dans quelle mesure elles peuvent prendre les actions appropriées pour atténuer la congestion.----------ABSTRACT: Road traffic congestion is a particular state of mobility where travel times increase and more and more time is spent in vehicles. Apart from being a quite-stressful experience for drivers, congestion also has a negative impact on the environment and the economy. In this context, there is pressure on the authorities to take decisive actions to improve the network traffic flow. By improving network flow, congestion is reduced and the total travel time of vehicles is decreased. In fact, congestion can be classified as recurrent and non-recurrent (NRC). Recurrent congestion refers to congestion that happens on a regular basis. Non-recurrent congestion in an urban network is mainly caused by incidents, workzones, special events and adverse weather. Infrastructure operators monitor traffic on the network while using the least possible resources. Thus, traffic state cannot be directly measured everywhere on the traffic road network. But the location where traffic flow needs to be improved varies highly and certainly, deploying highly sophisticated equipment to ensure the accurate estimation of traffic flows and timely detection of events everywhere on the road network is not feasible. Also, many studies have been devoted to highways rather than highly congested urban regions which are intricate, complex networks and far more likely to be monitored by the traffic authorities. Moreover, current traffic data collection systems do not incorporate the ability of registring detailed information on the altering events happening on the road, such as vehicle crashes, adverse weather, etc. Operators require external data sources to retireve this information in real time. Current methods only detect congestion but it’s not enough, we should be able to better characterize the event causing it. Agencies need to understand what is the cause affecting variability on their facilities and to what degree so that they can take the appropriate action to mitigate congestion