Adaptive Mechanisms to Improve Message Dissemination in Vehicular Networks

En el pasado, se han dedicado muchos recursos en construir mejores carreteras y autovías. Con el paso del tiempo, los objetivos fueron cambiando hacia las mejoras de los vehículos, consiguiendo cada vez vehículos más rápidos y con mayor autonomía. Más tarde, con la introducción de la electrónica en el mercado del automóvil, los vehículos fueron equipados con sensores, equipos de comunicaciones, y otros avances tecnológicos que han permitido la aparición de coches más eficientes, seguros y confortables. Las aplicaciones que nos permite el uso de las Redes Vehiculares (VNs) en términos de seguridad y eficiencia son múltiples, lo que justifica la cantidad y recursos de investigación que se están dedicando en los últimos años. En el desarrollo de esta Tesis, los esfuerzos se han centrado en el área de las Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks, una subclase de las Redes Vehiculares que se centra en las comunicaciones entre los vehículos, sin necesidad de que existan elementos de infraestructura. Con la intención de mejorar el proceso de diseminación de mensajes de alerta, imprescindibles para las aplicaciones relacionadas con la seguridad, se ha propuesto un esquema de difusión adaptativo, capaz de seleccionar automáticamente el mecanismo de difusión óptimo en función de la complejidad del mapa y de la densidad actual de vehículos. El principal objetivo es maximizar la efectividad en la difusión de mensajes, reduciendo al máximo el número de mensajes necesarios, evitando o mitigando las tormentas de difusión. Las propuestas actuales en el área de las VANETs, se centran principalmente en analizar escenarios con densidades típicas o promedio. Sin embargo, y debido a las características de este tipo de redes, a menudo se dan situaciones con densidades extremas (altas y bajas). Teniendo en cuenta los problemas que pueden ocasionar en el proceso de diseminación de los mensajes de emergencia, se han propuesto dos nuevos esquemas de difusión para bajas densidades: el \emph{Junction Store and Forward} (JSF) y el \emph{Neighbor Store and Forward} (NSF). Además, para situaciones de alta densidad de vehículos, se ha diseñado el \emph{Nearest Junction Located} (NJL), un esquema de diseminación que reduce notablemente el número de mensajes enviados, sin por ello perder prestaciones. Finalmente, hemos realizado una clasificacion de los esquemas de difusión para VANETs más importantes, analizando las características utilizadas en su diseño. Además hemos realizado una comparación de todos ellos, utilizando el mismo entorno de simulación y los mismos escenarios, permitiendo conocer cuál es el mejor esquema de diseminación a usar en cada momento

Design and Evaluation of a Traffic Safety System based on Vehicular Networks for the Next Generation of Intelligent Vehicles

La integración de las tecnologías de las telecomunicaciones en el sector del automóvil permitirá a los vehículos intercambiar información mediante Redes Vehiculares, ofreciendo numerosas posibilidades. Esta tesis se centra en la mejora de la seguridad vial y la reducción de la siniestralidad mediante Sistemas Inteligentes de Transporte (ITS). El primer paso consiste en obtener una difusión eficiente de los mensajes de advertencia sobre situaciones potencialmente peligrosas. Hemos desarrollado un marco para simular el intercambio de mensajes entre vehículos, utilizado para proponer esquemas eficientes de difusión. También demostramos que la disposición de las calles tiene gran influencia sobre la eficiencia del proceso. Nuestros algoritmos de difusión son parte de una arquitectura más amplia (e-NOTIFY) capaz de detectar accidentes de tráfico e informar a los servicios de emergencia. El desarrollo y evaluación de un prototipo demostró la viabilidad del sistema y cómo podría ayudar a reducir el número de víctimas en carretera

The Trap Coverage Area Protocol for Scalable Vehicular Target Tracking

Vehicle target tracking is a sub-field of increasing and increasing interest in the vehicular networking research area, in particular for its potential application in dense urban areas with low associated costs, e.g., by exploiting existing monitoring infrastructures and cooperative collaboration of regular vehicles. Inspired by the concept of trap coverage area, we have originally designed and implemented an original protocol for vehicle tracking in wide-scale urban scenarios, called TCAP. TCAP is capable of achieving the needed performance while exploiting a limited number of inexpensive sensors (e.g., public-authority cameras already installed at intersections for traffic monitoring), and opportunistic vehicle collaboration, with high scalability and low overhead if compared with state-of-the-art literature. In particular, the wide set of reported results show i) the suitability of our TCAP tracking in the challenging urban conditions of high density of vehicles, ii) the very weak dependency of TCAP performance from topology changes/constraints (e.g., street lengths and speed limits), iii) the TCAP capability of self-adapting to differentiated runtime conditions

Intelligent and bandwidth-efficient medium access control protocols for IEEE 802.11p-based Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) technology aims to enable safer and more sophisticated transportation via the spontaneous formation of Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). This type of wireless networks allows the exchange of kinematic and other data among vehicles, for the primary purpose of safer and more efficient driving, as well as efficient traffic management and other third-party services. Their infrastructure-less, unbounded nature allows the formation of dense networks that present a channel sharing issue, which is harder to tackle than in conventional WLANs. This thesis focuses on optimising channel access strategies, which is important for the efficient usage of the available wireless bandwidth and the successful deployment of VANETs. To start with, the default channel access control method for V2V is evaluated hardware via modifying the appropriate wireless interface Linux driver to enable finer on-the-fly control of IEEE 802.11p access control layer parameters. More complex channel sharing scenarios are evaluated via simulations and findings on the behaviour of the access control mechanism are presented. A complete channel sharing efficiency assessment is conducted, including throughput, fairness and latency measurements. A new IEEE 802.11p-compatible Q-Learning-based access control approach that improves upon the studied protocol is presented. The stations feature algorithms that “learn” how to act optimally in VANETs in order to maximise their achieved packet delivery and minimise bandwidth wastage. The feasibility of Q-Learning to be used as the base of selflearning protocols for IEEE 802.11p-based V2V communication access control in dense environments is investigated in terms of parameter tuning, necessary time of exploration, achieving latency requirements, scaling, multi-hop and accommodation of simultaneous applications. Additionally, the novel Collection Contention Estimation (CCE) mechanism for Q-Learning-based access control is presented. By embedding it on the Q-Learning agents, faster convergence, higher throughput, better service separation and short-term fairness are achieved in simulated network deployments. The acquired new insights on the network performance of the proposed algorithms can provide precise guidelines for efficient designs of practical, reliable, fair and ultra-low latency V2V communication systems for dense topologies. These results can potentially have an impact across a range of related areas, including various types of wireless networks and resource allocation for these, network protocol and transceiver design as well as QLearning applicability and considerations for correct use

Quality of Service in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: Methodical Evaluation and Enhancements for ITS-G5

After many formative years, the ad hoc wireless communication between vehicles has become a vehicular technology available in mass production cars in 2020. Vehicles form spontaneous Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), which enable communication whenever vehicles are nearby without need for supportive infrastructure. In Europe, this communication is standardised comprehensively as Intelligent Transport Systems in the 5.9 GHz band (ITS-G5). This thesis centres around Quality of Service (QoS) in these VANETs based on ITS-G5 technology. Whilst only a few vehicles communicate, radio resources are plenty, and channel congestion is a minor issue. With progressing deployment, congestion control becomes crucial to preserve QoS by preventing high latencies or foiled information dissemination. The developed VANET simulation model, featuring an elaborated ITS-G5 protocol stack, allows investigation of QoS methodically. It also considers the characteristics of ITS-G5 radios such as the signal attenuation in vehicular environments and the capture effect by receivers. Backed by this simulation model, several enhancements for ITS-G5 are proposed to control congestion reliably and thus ensure QoS for its applications. Modifications at the GeoNetworking (GN) protocol prevent massive packet occurrences in a short time and hence congestion. Glow Forwarding is introduced as GN extension to distribute delay-tolerant information. The revised Decentralized Congestion Control (DCC) cross-layer supports low-latency transmission of event-triggered, periodic and relayed packets. DCC triggers periodic services and manages a shared duty cycle budget dedicated to packet forwarding for this purpose. Evaluation in large-scale networks reveals that this enhanced ITS-G5 system can reliably reduce the information age of periodically sent messages. The forwarding budget virtually eliminates the starvation of multi-hop packets and still avoids congestion caused by excessive forwarding. The presented enhancements thus pave the way to scale up VANETs for wide-spread deployment and future applications

Road-based routing in vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) can provide scalable and cost-effective solutions for applications such as traffic safety, dynamic route planning, and context-aware advertisement using short-range wireless communication. To function properly, these applications require efficient routing protocols. However, existing mobile ad hoc network routing and forwarding approaches have limited performance in VANETs. This dissertation shows that routing protocols which account for VANET-specific characteristics in their designs, such as high density and constrained mobility, can provide good performance for a large spectrum of applications. This work proposes a novel class of routing protocols as well as three forwarding optimizations for VANETs. The Road-Based using Vehicular Traffic (RBVT) routing is a novel class of routing protocols for VANETs. RBVT protocols leverage real-time vehicular traffic information to create stable road-based paths consisting of successions of road intersections that have, with high probability, network connectivity among them. Evaluations of RBVT protocols working in conjunction with geographical forwarding show delivery rate increases as much as 40% and delay decreases as much as 85% when compared with existing protocols. Three optimizations are proposed to increase forwarding performance. First, one- hop geographical forwarding is improved using a distributed receiver-based election of next hops, which leads to as much as 3 times higher delivery rates in highly congested networks. Second, theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the delay in highly congested networks can be reduced by half by switching from traditional FIFO with Taildrop queuing to LIFO with Frontdrop queuing. Third, nodes can determine suitable times to transmit data across RBVT paths or proactively replace routes before they break using analytical models that accurately predict the expected road-based path durations in VANETs

Towards reliable geographic broadcasting in vehicular networks

In Vehicular ad hoc Networks (VANETs), safety-related messages are broadcasted amongst cars, helping to improve drivers' awareness of the road situation. VANETs’ reliability are highly affected by channel contention. This thesis first addresses the issue of channel use efficiency in geographical broadcasts (geocasts). Constant connectivity changes inside a VANET make the existing routing algorithms unsuitable. This thesis presents a geocast algorithm that uses a metric to estimate the ratio of useful to useless packet received. Simulations showed that this algorithm is more channel-efficient than the farthest-first strategy. It also exposes a parameter, allowing it to adapt to channel load. Second, this thesis presents a method of estimating channel load for providing feedback to moderate the offered load. A theoretical model showing the relationship between channel load and the idle time between transmissions is presented and used to estimate channel contention. Unsaturated stations on the network were shown to have small but observable effects on this relationship. In simulations, channel estimators based on this model show higher accuracy and faster convergence time than by observing packet collisions. These estimators are also less affected by unsaturated stations than by observing packet collisions. Third, this thesis couples the channel estimator to the geocast algorithm, producing a closed-loop load-reactive system that allows geocasts to adapt to instantaneous channel conditions. Simulations showed that this system is not only shown to be more efficient in channel use and be able to adapt to channel contention, but is also able to self-correct suboptimal retransmission decisions. Finally, this thesis demonstrates that all tested network simulators exhibit unexpected behaviours when simulating broadcasts. This thesis describes in depth the error in ns-3, leading to a set of workarounds that allows results from most versions of ns-3 to be interpreted correctly

Models and Protocols for Resource Optimization in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks are built on a mix of fixed and mobile nodes interconnected via wireless links to form a multihop ad hoc network. An emerging application area for wireless mesh networks is their evolution into a converged infrastructure used to share and extend, to mobile users, the wireless Internet connectivity of sparsely deployed fixed lines with heterogeneous capacity, ranging from ISP-owned broadband links to subscriber owned low-speed connections. In this thesis we address different key research issues for this networking scenario. First, we propose an analytical predictive tool, developing a queuing network model capable of predicting the network capacity and we use it in a load aware routing protocol in order to provide, to the end users, a quality of service based on the throughput. We then extend the queuing network model and introduce a multi-class queuing network model to predict analytically the average end-to-end packet delay of the traffic flows among the mobile end users and the Internet. The analytical models are validated against simulation. Second, we propose an address auto-configuration solution to extend the coverage of a wireless mesh network by interconnecting it to a mobile ad hoc network in a transparent way for the infrastructure network (i.e., the legacy Internet interconnected to the wireless mesh network). Third, we implement two real testbed prototypes of the proposed solutions as a proof-of-concept, both for the load aware routing protocol and the auto-configuration protocol. Finally we discuss the issues related to the adoption of ad hoc networking technologies to address the fragility of our communication infrastructure and to build the next generation of dependable, secure and rapidly deployable communications infrastructures

Improving Vehicular ad hoc Network Protocols to Support Safety Applications in Realistic Scenarios

La convergencia de las telecomunicaciones, la informática, la tecnología inalámbrica y los sistemas de transporte, va a facilitar que nuestras carreteras y autopistas nos sirvan tanto como plataforma de transporte, como de comunicaciones. Estos cambios van a revolucionar completamente cómo y cuándo vamos a acceder a determinados servicios, comunicarnos, viajar, entretenernos, y navegar, en un futuro muy cercano. Las redes vehiculares ad hoc (vehicular ad hoc networks VANETs) son redes de comunicación inalámbricas que no requieren de ningún tipo de infraestructura, y que permiten la comunicación y conducción cooperativa entre los vehículos en la carretera. Los vehículos actúan como nodos de comunicación y transmisores, formando redes dinámicas junto a otros vehículos cercanos en entornos urbanos y autopistas. Las características especiales de las redes vehiculares favorecen el desarrollo de servicios y aplicaciones atractivas y desafiantes. En esta tesis nos centramos en las aplicaciones relacionadas con la seguridad. Específicamente, desarrollamos y evaluamos un novedoso protocol que mejora la seguridad en las carreteras. Nuestra propuesta combina el uso de información de la localización de los vehículos y las características del mapa del escenario, para mejorar la diseminación de los mensajes de alerta. En las aplicaciones de seguridad para redes vehiculares, nuestra propuesta permite reducir el problema de las tormentas de difusión, mientras que se mantiene una alta efectividad en la diseminación de los mensajes hacia los vehículos cercanos. Debido a que desplegar y evaluar redes VANET supone un gran coste y una tarea dura, la metodología basada en la simulación se muestra como una metodología alternativa a la implementación real. A diferencia de otros trabajos previos, con el fin de evaluar nuestra propuesta en un entorno realista, en nuestras simulaciones tenemos muy en cuenta tanto la movilidad de los vehículos, como la transmisión de radio en entornos urbanos, especialmente cuando los edificios interfieren en la propagación de la señal de radio. Con este propósito, desarrollamos herramientas para la simulación de VANETs más precisas y realistas, mejorando tanto la modelización de la propagación de radio, como la movilidad de los vehículos, obteniendo una solución que permite integrar mapas reales en el entorno de simulación. Finalmente, evaluamos las prestaciones de nuestro protocolo propuesto haciendo uso de nuestra plataforma de simulación mejorada, evidenciando la importancia del uso de un entorno de simulación adecuado para conseguir resultados más realistas y poder obtener conclusiones más significativas.Martínez Domínguez, FJ. (2010). Improving Vehicular ad hoc Network Protocols to Support Safety Applications in Realistic Scenarios [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/9195Palanci