The Dynamics of Vehicular Networks in Urban Environments

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) have emerged as a platform to support intelligent inter-vehicle communication and improve traffic safety and performance. The road-constrained, high mobility of vehicles, their unbounded power source, and the emergence of roadside wireless infrastructures make VANETs a challenging research topic. A key to the development of protocols for inter-vehicle communication and services lies in the knowledge of the topological characteristics of the VANET communication graph. This paper explores the dynamics of VANETs in urban environments and investigates the impact of these findings in the design of VANET routing protocols. Using both real and realistic mobility traces, we study the networking shape of VANETs under different transmission and market penetration ranges. Given that a number of RSUs have to be deployed for disseminating information to vehicles in an urban area, we also study their impact on vehicular connectivity. Through extensive simulations we investigate the performance of VANET routing protocols by exploiting the knowledge of VANET graphs analysis.Comment: Revised our testbed with even more realistic mobility traces. Used the location of real Wi-Fi hotspots to simulate RSUs in our study. Used a larger, real mobility trace set, from taxis in Shanghai. Examine the implications of our findings in the design of VANET routing protocols by implementing in ns-3 two routing protocols (GPCR & VADD). Updated the bibliography section with new research work

Social-aware Forwarding in Opportunistic Wireless Networks: Content Awareness or Obliviousness?

With the current host-based Internet architecture, networking faces limitations in dynamic scenarios, due mostly to host mobility. The ICN paradigm mitigates such problems by releasing the need to have an end-to-end transport session established during the life time of the data transfer. Moreover, the ICN concept solves the mismatch between the Internet architecture and the way users would like to use it: currently a user needs to know the topological location of the hosts involved in the communication when he/she just wants to get the data, independently of its location. Most of the research efforts aim to come up with a stable ICN architecture in fixed networks, with few examples in ad-hoc and vehicular networks. However, the Internet is becoming more pervasive with powerful personal mobile devices that allow users to form dynamic networks in which content may be exchanged at all times and with low cost. Such pervasive wireless networks suffer with different levels of disruption given user mobility, physical obstacles, lack of cooperation, intermittent connectivity, among others. This paper discusses the combination of content knowledge (e.g., type and interested parties) and social awareness within opportunistic networking as to drive the deployment of ICN solutions in disruptive networking scenarios. With this goal in mind, we go over few examples of social-aware content-based opportunistic networking proposals that consider social awareness to allow content dissemination independently of the level of network disruption. To show how much content knowledge can improve social-based solutions, we illustrate by means of simulation some content-oblivious/oriented proposals in scenarios based on synthetic mobility patterns and real human traces.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Road side unit deployment: a density-based approach

© 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Currently, the number of vehicles increases every year, raising the probability of having accidents. When an accident occurs, wireless technologies enable vehicles to share warning messages with other vehicles by using vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications, and with the emergency services by using vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications. Regarding vehicle to infrastructure communications, Road Side Units (RSUs) act similarly to wireless LAN access points, and can provide communications with the infrastructure. Since RSUs are usually very expensive to install, authorities limit their number, especially in suburbs and areas of sparse population, making RSUs a precious resource in vehicular environments. In this paper, we propose a Density-based Road Side Unit deployment policy (D-RSU), specially designed to obtain an efficient system with the lowest possible cost to alert emergency services in case of an accident. Our approach is based on deploying RSUs using an inverse proportion to the expected density of vehicles. The obtained results show how D-RSU is able to reduce the required number of RSUs, as well as the accident notification time.This work was partially supported by the Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia, Spain, under Grant TIN2011-27543-C03-01, as well as by the Fundacion Universitaria Antonio Gargallo (FUAG), and the Caja de Ahorros de la Inmaculada (CAI).Barrachina, J.; Garrido, P.; Fogue, M.; Martínez, FJ.; Cano Escribá, JC.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Manzoni, P. (2013). Road side unit deployment: a density-based approach. IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine. 5(3):30-39. https://doi.org/10.1109/MITS.2013.2253159S30395

Centrality Analysis in Vehicular Networks

To better understand networking and security aspects of VANETs, we have been investigating network connectivity issues and mappings of car networks to the underlying road topology. Using this mapping and various metrics based on centrality, we locate hot-spots in vehicular networks to determine the most vulnerable points for jamming. We also use these to optimize the placement of roadside units

Probabilistic deployment of dissemination points in urban areas to support vehicular communication

This work presents a probabilistic constructive heuristic to support the design of roadside infrastructure for information dissemination in vehicular networks. We formulate this as a Probabilistic Maximum Coverage Problem (PMCP) and we intend to maximize the number of vehicles that get in contact with the infrastructure. We compare our approach with non-probabilistic MCP in simulated urban areas following a Manhattan-style topology with variable traffic conditions. The main contributions of this work are (i) the formal definition of the Probabilistic Maximum Coverage Problem, (ii) the application of PMCP to solve one instance of the problem of facilities allocation and (iii) the application of a probabilistic approach to model the volume of vehicles along the urban area, where the position of each vehicle is no longer considered deterministic, but it is treated as a probability function distributed over all the intersections. The vehicles no longer have a position. Instead, vehicles have a probability of being in a given position at a given instant of time. The results reveal that PMCP requires less dissemination points (DPs) to achieve similar coverage ratio than non-probabilistic MCP, while preserving the same samples deviation.Keywords: vehicular networks, maximum coverage problem, information dissemination