Fog Connectivity Clustering and MDP Modeling for Software-defined Vehicular Networks

Intelligent and networked vehicles cooperate to create a mobile Cloud through vehicular Fog computing (VFC). Such clouds rely heavily on the underlying vehicular networks, so estimating communication resilience allows to address the problems caused by intermittent vehicle connectivity for data transfers. Individually estimating the communication stability of vehicles, nevertheless, undergoes incorrect predictions due to their particular mobility patterns. Therefore, we provide a region-oriented fog management model based on the connectivity through vehicular heterogeneous network environment via V2X and C-V2X. A fog management strategy dynamically monitors nearby vehicles to determine distinct regions in urban centres. The model enables a software-defined vehicular network (\Gls{SDVN}) controller to coordinate data flows. The vehicular connectivity described by our model assesses the potential for vehicle communication and conducts dynamic vehicle clustering. From the stochasticity of the environment, our model is based on Markov Decision Process (MDP), tracking the status of vehicle clusters and their potential for provisioning services. The model for vehicular clustering is supported by 5G and DSRC heterogeneous networks. Simulated analyses have shown the capability of our proposed model to estimate cluster reliability in real-time urban scenarios and support effective vehicular fog management

Video Streaming over Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: A Comparative Study and Future Perspectives

Vehicular  Ad Hoc Network  (VANET) is emerged as an important research area that provides ubiquitous short-range connectivity among moving vehicles.  This network enables efficient traffic safety and infotainment applications. One of the promising applications is video transmission in vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-infrastructure environments.  But, video streaming over vehicular environment is a daunting task due to high movement of vehicles. This paper presents a survey on state-of-arts of video streaming over VANET. Furthermore, taxonomy of vehicular video transmission is highlighted in this paper with special focus on significant applications and their requirements with challenges, video content sharing, multi-source video streaming and video broadcast services. The comparative study of the paper compares the video streaming schemes based on type of error resilient technique, objective of study, summary of their study, the utilized simulator and the type of video sharing.  Lastly, we discussed the open issues and research directions related to video communication over VANET

Vehicular Networks with Infrastructure: Modeling, Simulation and Testbed

This thesis focuses on Vehicular Networks with Infrastructure. In the examined scenarios, vehicular nodes (e.g., cars, buses) can communicate with infrastructure roadside units (RSUs) providing continuous or intermittent coverage of an urban road topology. Different aspects related to the design of new applications for Vehicular Networks are investigated through modeling, simulation and testing on real field. In particular, the thesis: i) provides a feasible multi-hop routing solution for maintaining connectivity among RSUs, forming the wireless mesh infrastructure, and moving vehicles; ii) explains how to combine the UHF and the traditional 5-GHz bands to design and implement a new high-capacity high-efficiency Content Downloading using disjoint control and service channels; iii) studies new RSUs deployment strategies for Content Dissemination and Downloading in urban and suburban scenarios with different vehicles mobility models and traffic densities; iv) defines an optimization problem to minimize the average travel delay perceived by the drivers, spreading different traffic flows over the surface roads in a urban scenario; v) exploits the concept of Nash equilibrium in the game-theory approach to efficiently guide electric vehicles drivers' towards the charging stations. Moreover, the thesis emphasizes the importance of using realistic mobility models, as well as reasonable signal propagation models for vehicular networks. Simplistic assumptions drive to trivial mathematical analysis and shorter simulations, but they frequently produce misleading results. Thus, testing the proposed solutions in the real field and collecting measurements is a good way to double-check the correctness of our studie

Performance Evaluation of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks using simulation tools

Recent studies demonstrate that the routing protocol performances in vehicular networks can improve using dynamic information on the traffic conditions. WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) and VANETs (Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks) are exactly related with this statement and represent the trend of wireless networks research program in the last years. In this context, a new type of network has been developed: in fact, HSVN (Hybrid Sensor and Vehicular Network) let WSNs and VANETs cooperate through dynamic information data exchanges with the aim to improve road safety, and especially to warn the driver and the co-pilot of any event occurred in the road ahead, such as traffic jam, accidents or bad weather. The results will be immediate: less accidents means more saved lives, less traffic means a pollution decrease, and from the technological point of view, this communication protocol will open the door to attractive services, such as downloading of multimedia services or internet browsing, that means easier, safer and more comfortable trips. It is out of doubt that speaking about cars and road technology developments, the market and the interests about this field increase exponentially. Recent projects such as CVIS [1] and COMeSafety [2], focused on improving the road driving, and are the concrete demonstration that this entire context can get soon very close to reality. Owing to their peculiar characteristics, VANETs require the definition of specific networking techniques, whose feasibility and performance are usually tested by means of simulation. Starting from this point, this project will present a HSVN platform, and will also introduce and evaluate a communication protocol between VANETs and WSNs using the NCTUns 6.0 [3] simulator. We will particularly analyze the performances of 2 types of Scenarios developed during our project. Both of them are in an urban context, but we will extract different useful results analyzing the packet losses, the throughput and the end-to-end packet delay

Improving TCP behaviour to non-invasively share spectrum with safety messages in VANET

There is a broad range of technologies available for wireless communications for moving vehicles, such as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMax), 3G, Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC)/ Wireless Access for Vehicular Environment (WAVE) and Mobile Broadband Wireless Access (MBWA). These technologies are needed to support delay-sensitive safety related applications such as collision avoidance and emergency breaking. Among them, the IEEE802.11p standard (aka DSRC/WAVE), a Wi-Fi based medium RF range technology, is considered to be one of the best suited draft architectures for time-sensitive safety applications. In addition to safety applications, however, services of non-safety nature like electronic toll tax collection, infotainment and traffic control are also becoming important these days. To support delay-insensitive infotainment applications, the DSRC protocol suite also provides facilities to use Internet Protocols. The DSRC architecture actually consists of WAVE Short Messaging Protocol (WSMP) specifically formulated for realtime safety applications as well as the conventional transport layer protocols TCP/UDP for non-safety purposes. But the layer four protocol TCP was originally designed for reliable data delivery only over wired networks, and so the performance quality was not guaranteed for the wireless medium, especially in the highly unstable network topology engendered by fast moving vehicles. The vehicular wireless medium is inherently unreliable because of intermittent disconnections caused by moving vehicles, and in addition, it suffers from multi-path and fading phenomena (and a host of others) that greatly degrade the network performance. One of the TCP problems in the context of vehicular wireless network is that it interprets transmission errors as symptomatic of an incipient congestion situation and as a result, reduces the throughput deliberately by frequently invoking slow-start congestion control algorithms. Despite the availability of many congestion control mechanisms to address this problem, the conventional TCP continues to suffer from poor performance when deployed in the Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) environment. Moreover, the way non-safety applications, when pressed into service, will treat the existing delay-sensitive safety messaging applications and the way these two types of applications interact between them are not (well) understood, and therefore, in order for them to coexist, the implication and repercussion need to be examined closely. This is especially important as IEEE 802.11p standards are not designed keeping in view the issues TCP raises in relation to safety messages. This dissertation addresses the issues arising out of this situation and in particular confronts the congestion challenges thrown up in the context of heterogenous communication in VANET environment by proposing an innovative solution with two optimized congestion control algorithms. Extensive simulation studies conducted by the author shows that both these algorithms have improved TCP performance in terms of metrics like Packet Delivery Fraction (PDF), Packet Loss and End-to-End Delay (E2ED), and at the same time they encourage the non-safety TCP application to behave unobtrusively and cooperatively to a large extent with DSRC’s safety applications. The first algorithm, called vScalable-TCP – a modification of the existing TCPScalable variant – introduces a reliable transport protocol suitable for DSRC. In the proposed approach, whenever packets are discarded excessively due to congestion, the slow-start mechanism is purposely suppressed temporarily to avoid further congestion and packet loss. The crucial idea here is how to adjust and regulate the behaviour of vScalable-TCP in a way that the existing safety message flows are least disturbed. The simulation results confirm that the new vScalable-TCP provides better performance for real-time safety applications than TCP-Reno and other TCP variants considered in this thesis in terms of standard performance metrics. The second algorithm, named vLP-TCP – a modification of the existing TCP-LP variant – is designed to test and demonstrate that the strategy developed for vScalable-TCP is also compatible with another congestion control mechanism and achieves the same purpose. This expectation is borne out well by the simulation results. The same slow-start congestion management strategy has been employed but with only a few amendments. This modified algorithm also improves substantially the performance of basic safety management applications. The present work thus clearly confirms that both vScalable-TCP and vLP-TCP algorithms – the prefix ‘v’ to the names standing for ‘vehicular’ – outperform the existing unadorned TCP-Scalable and TCP-LP algorithms, in terms of standard performance metrics, while at the same time behaving in a friendly manner, by way of sharing bandwidth non-intrusively with DSRC safety applications. This paves the way for the smooth and harmonious coexistence of these two broad, clearly incompatible or complementary categories of applications – viz. time-sensitive safety applications and delay-tolerant infotainment applications – by narrowing down their apparent impedance or behavioural mismatch, when they are coerced to go hand in hand in a DSRC environment

Performance Evaluation of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks using simulation tools

Recent studies demonstrate that the routing protocol performances in vehicular networks can improve using dynamic information on the traffic conditions. WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) and VANETs (Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks) are exactly related with this statement and represent the trend of wireless networks research program in the last years. In this context, a new type of network has been developed: in fact, HSVN (Hybrid Sensor and Vehicular Network) let WSNs and VANETs cooperate through dynamic information data exchanges with the aim to improve road safety, and especially to warn the driver and the co-pilot of any event occurred in the road ahead, such as traffic jam, accidents or bad weather. The results will be immediate: less accidents means more saved lives, less traffic means a pollution decrease, and from the technological point of view, this communication protocol will open the door to attractive services, such as downloading of multimedia services or internet browsing, that means easier, safer and more comfortable trips. It is out of doubt that speaking about cars and road technology developments, the market and the interests about this field increase exponentially. Recent projects such as CVIS [1] and COMeSafety [2], focused on improving the road driving, and are the concrete demonstration that this entire context can get soon very close to reality. Owing to their peculiar characteristics, VANETs require the definition of specific networking techniques, whose feasibility and performance are usually tested by means of simulation. Starting from this point, this project will present a HSVN platform, and will also introduce and evaluate a communication protocol between VANETs and WSNs using the NCTUns 6.0 [3] simulator. We will particularly analyze the performances of 2 types of Scenarios developed during our project. Both of them are in an urban context, but we will extract different useful results analyzing the packet losses, the throughput and the end-to-end packet delay

Dynamic wireless mobile framework for distributed collaborative real-time information generation and control systems

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have only recently discovered the exciting possibilities in the nomadic and ubiquitous computing space to build a new generation of information systems by allowing the vehicle to act both as a carrier and consumer of wireless (and thus omnipresent) information. Wide deployment of such ITS systems may eventually allow for more dynamic and efficient transportation systems, which can contribute in several ways towards greater economic growth whilst respecting environmental sustainability. A great number of researchers have dedicated considerable time and resources to tackling traffic related issues by utilising the new wireless capabilities enabled by ITS; such initiatives cover a wide range of applications such as safety, knowledge sharing and infotainment. Indicative of the extent of such efforts is the plethora of research projects initiated by many national and multi-national organisations such as the EU Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development. To achieve their goals, proposed solutions from such organisations depend on the development and deployment of intelligent wireless mobile communication systems, where data dissemination issues make the prospect of efficient and effective communication a challenging proposition. Presently, Car-to-Car and Car-to-Infrastructure communications are two distinct avenues that make possible efficient and reliable delivery of messages via direct radio links in traffic areas. In all cases, high quality of communication performance is desirable for a communication system composed mostly of roaming participants; such a system needs to be dynamic, flexible and infrastructure-less. Consequently, Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET)-based networks are a natural fit to ITS

Recent advances in connected vehicles via information-centric networking

V2X communication technology allows vehicles to communicate with each other, infrastructures as well as other parties. It is considered as a vital role in realizing future Intelligent Transport System (ITS). On one hand V2X is facing various expectations that requested by different features of applications, On the other hand, V2X has to overcome problems caused by the natures of high mobile vehicle environment. ICN proposed as the a substitution for future Internet rely on its naming design is likely to associate with V2X well in contrast to convention TCP/IP solution. This paper viewed recent relevant literatures from which unaddressed problems are identified with discussion of possible solutions. From this work, we are positioning our future efforts to fulfil such gaps

Connecting vehicular networks to the internet : a life time-based routing protocol

Inter-Vehicle Communications have recently attracted the attention of researchers in academia and industry. In such networks, vehicles should be able to communicate among each other (V2V) as well as with roadside Infrastructure units (V2I). Vehicular networks try to provide safety on the roads by disseminating critical messages among vehicles. Infrastructure units provide some services such as driver information systems and Internet access. Because of the high speed and high mobility of vehicles, establishing and maintaining a connection to these units is very challenging. We introduce a new protocol that uses the characteristics of vehicle movements to predict the vehicle behavior and select a route with the longest life-time to connect to the wired network. It aims at spreading the advertisement messages through multi-hops without flooding the network, do seamless hand-overs and select the most stable routes to these units. We performed some simulations and compared the performance of our work with some well-known protocols