Timely and reliable packets delivery over Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) for road accidents prevention: a cross-layer approach

With the envisioned era of Internet of Things (IoTs), all aspects of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) will be connected to improve transport safety, relieve traffic congestion, reduce air pollution, enhance the comfort of transportation and significantly reduce road accidents. In IoVs, regular exchange of current position, direction, velocity, etc., enables mobile vehicles to predict an upcoming accident and alert the human drivers in time or proactively take precautionary actions to avoid the accident. The actualization of this concept requires the use of channel access protocols that can guarantee reliable and timely broadcast of safety messages. This paper investigates the application of network coding concept to increase content of every transmission and achieve improved broadcast reliability with less number of retransmission. In particular, we proposed Code Aided Retransmission-based Error Recovery (CARER) scheme, introduced an RTB/CTB handshake to overcome hidden node problem and reduce packets collision rate. In order to avoid broadcast storm problem associated with the use of RTB/CTB packet in a broadcast transmission, we developed a rebroadcasting metric used to successfully select a vehicle to rebroadcast the encoded message. The performance of CARER protocol is clearly shown with detailed theoretical analysis and further validated with simulation experiments

Model checking medium access control for sensor networks

We describe verification of S-MAC, a medium access control protocol designed for wireless sensor networks, by means of the PRISM model checker. The S-MAC protocol is built on top of the IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless ad hoc networks and, as such, it uses the same randomised backoff procedure as a means to avoid collision. In order to minimise energy consumption, in S-MAC, nodes are periodically put into a sleep state. Synchronisation of the sleeping schedules is necessary for the nodes to be able to communicate. Intuitively, energy saving obtained through a periodic sleep mechanism will be at the expense of performance. In previous work on S-MAC verification, a combination of analytical techniques and simulation has been used to confirm the correctness of this intuition for a simplified (abstract) version of the protocol in which the initial schedules coordination phase is assumed correct. We show how we have used the PRISM model checker to verify the behaviour of S-MAC and compare it to that of IEEE 802.11

Achieving reliable and enhanced communication in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs)

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyWith the envisioned age of Internet of Things (IoTs), different aspects of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) will be linked so as to advance road transportation safety, ease congestion of road traffic, lessen air pollution, improve passenger transportation comfort and significantly reduce road accidents. In vehicular networks, regular exchange of current position, direction, speed, etc., enable mobile vehicle to foresee an imminent vehicle accident and notify the driver early enough in order to take appropriate action(s) or the vehicle on its own may take adequate preventive measures to avert the looming accident. Actualizing this concept requires use of shared media access protocol that is capable of guaranteeing reliable and timely broadcast of safety messages. This dissertation investigates the use of Network Coding (NC) techniques to enrich the content of each transmission and ensure improved high reliability of the broadcasted safety messages with less number of retransmissions. A Code Aided Retransmission-based Error Recovery (CARER) protocol is proposed. In order to avoid broadcast storm problem, a rebroadcasting vehicle selection metric η, is developed, which is used to select a vehicle that will rebroadcast the received encoded message. Although the proposed CARER protocol demonstrates an impressive performance, the level of incurred overhead is fairly high due to the use of complex rebroadcasting vehicle selection metric. To resolve this issue, a Random Network Coding (RNC) and vehicle clustering based vehicular communication scheme with low algorithmic complexity, named Reliable and Enhanced Cooperative Cross-layer MAC (RECMAC) scheme, is proposed. The use of this clustering technique enables RECMAC to subdivide the vehicular network into small manageable, coordinated clusters which further improve transmission reliability and minimise negative impact of network overhead. Similarly, a Cluster Head (CH) selection metric ℱ(\u1d457) is designed, which is used to determine and select the most suitably qualified candidate to become the CH of a particular cluster. Finally, in order to investigate the impact of available radio spectral resource, an in-depth study of the required amount of spectrum sufficient to support high transmission reliability and minimum latency requirements of critical road safety messages in vehicular networks was carried out. The performance of the proposed schemes was clearly shown with detailed theoretical analysis and was further validated with simulation experiments

Quality-Aware Broadcasting Strategies for Position Estimation in VANETs

The dissemination of vehicle position data all over the network is a fundamental task in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) operations, as applications often need to know the position of other vehicles over a large area. In such cases, inter-vehicular communications should be exploited to satisfy application requirements, although congestion control mechanisms are required to minimize the packet collision probability. In this work, we face the issue of achieving accurate vehicle position estimation and prediction in a VANET scenario. State of the art solutions to the problem try to broadcast the positioning information periodically, so that vehicles can ensure that the information their neighbors have about them is never older than the inter-transmission period. However, the rate of decay of the information is not deterministic in complex urban scenarios: the movements and maneuvers of vehicles can often be erratic and unpredictable, making old positioning information inaccurate or downright misleading. To address this problem, we propose to use the Quality of Information (QoI) as the decision factor for broadcasting. We implement a threshold-based strategy to distribute position information whenever the positioning error passes a reference value, thereby shifting the objective of the network to limiting the actual positioning error and guaranteeing quality across the VANET. The threshold-based strategy can reduce the network load by avoiding the transmission of redundant messages, as well as improving the overall positioning accuracy by more than 20% in realistic urban scenarios.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables, accepted for presentation at European Wireless 201

Reliable Message Dissemination in Mobile Vehicular Networks

Les réseaux véhiculaires accueillent une multitude d’applications d’info-divertissement et de sécurité. Les applications de sécurité visent à améliorer la sécurité sur les routes (éviter les accidents), tandis que les applications d’info-divertissement visent à améliorer l'expérience des passagers. Les applications de sécurité ont des exigences rigides en termes de délais et de fiabilité ; en effet, la diffusion des messages d’urgence (envoyés par un véhicule/émetteur) devrait être fiable et rapide. Notons que, pour diffuser des informations sur une zone de taille plus grande que celle couverte par la portée de transmission d’un émetteur, il est nécessaire d’utiliser un mécanisme de transmission multi-sauts. De nombreuses approches ont été proposées pour assurer la fiabilité et le délai des dites applications. Toutefois, ces méthodes présentent plusieurs lacunes. Cette thèse, nous proposons trois contributions. La première contribution aborde la question de la diffusion fiable des messages d’urgence. A cet égard, un nouveau schéma, appelé REMD, a été proposé. Ce schéma utilise la répétition de message pour offrir une fiabilité garantie, à chaque saut, tout en assurant un court délai. REMD calcule un nombre optimal de répétitions en se basant sur l’estimation de la qualité de réception de lien dans plusieurs locations (appelées cellules) à l’intérieur de la zone couverte par la portée de transmission de l’émetteur. REMD suppose que les qualités de réception de lien des cellules adjacentes sont indépendantes. Il sélectionne, également, un nombre de véhicules, appelés relais, qui coopèrent dans le contexte de la répétition du message d’urgence pour assurer la fiabilité en multi-sauts. La deuxième contribution, appelée BCRB, vise à améliorer REMD ; elle suppose que les qualités de réception de lien des cellules adjacentes sont dépendantes ce qui est, généralement, plus réaliste. BCRB utilise les réseaux Bayésiens pour modéliser les dépendances en vue d’estimer la qualité du lien de réception avec une meilleure précision. La troisième contribution, appelée RICS, offre un accès fiable à Internet. RICS propose un modèle d’optimisation, avec une résolution exacte optimale à l'aide d’une technique de réduction de la dimension spatiale, pour le déploiement des passerelles. Chaque passerelle utilise BCRB pour établir une communication fiable avec les véhicules.Vehicular networks aim to enable a plethora of safety and infotainment applications. Safety applications aim to preserve people's lives (e.g., by helping in avoiding crashes) while infotainment applications focus on enhancing the passengers’ experience. These applications, especially safety applications, have stringent requirements in terms of reliability and delay; indeed, dissemination of an emergency message (e.g., by a vehicle/sender involved in a crash) should be reliable while satisfying short delay requirements. Note, that multi-hop dissemination is needed to reach all vehicles, in the target area, that may be outside the transmission range of the sender. Several schemes have been proposed to provide reliability and short delay for vehicular applications. However, these schemes have several limitations. Thus, the design of new solutions, to meet the requirement of vehicular applications in terms of reliability while keeping low end-to-end delay, is required. In this thesis, we propose three schemes. The first scheme is a multi-hop reliable emergency message dissemination scheme, called REMD, which guarantees a predefined reliability , using message repetitions/retransmissions, while satisfying short delay requirements. It computes an optimal number of repetitions based on the estimation of link reception quality at different locations (called cells) in the transmission range of the sender; REMD assumes that link reception qualities of adjacent cells are independent. It also adequately selects a number of vehicles, called forwarders, that cooperate in repeating the emergency message with the objective to satisfy multi-hop reliability requirements. The second scheme, called BCRB, overcomes the shortcoming of REMD by assuming that link reception qualities of adjacent cells are dependent which is more realistic in real-life scenarios. BCRB makes use of Bayesian networks to model these dependencies; this allows for more accurate estimation of link reception qualities leading to better performance of BCRB. The third scheme, called RICS, provides internet access to vehicles by establishing multi-hop reliable paths to gateways. In RICS, the gateway placement is modeled as a k-center optimisation problem. A space dimension reduction technique is used to solve the problem in exact time. Each gateway makes use of BCRB to establish reliable communication paths to vehicles

Channel Access Management in Data Intensive Sensor Networks

There are considerable challenges for channel access in Data Intensive Sensor Networks - DISN, supporting Data Intensive Applications like Structural Health Monitoring. As the data load increases, considerable degradation of the key performance parameters of such sensor networks is observed. Successful packet delivery ratio drops due to frequent collisions and retransmissions. The data glut results in increased latency and energy consumption overall. With the considerable limitations on sensor node resources like battery power, this implies that excessive transmissions in response to sensor queries can lead to premature network death. After a certain load threshold the performance characteristics of traditional WSNs become unacceptable. Research work indicates that successful packet delivery ratio in 802.15.4 networks can drop from 95% to 55% as the offered network load increases from 1 packet/sec to 10 packets/sec. This result in conjunction with the fact that it is common for sensors in an SHM system to generate 6-8 packets/sec of vibration data makes it important to design appropriate channel access schemes for such data intensive applications.In this work, we address the problem of significant performance degradation in a special-purpose DISN. Our specific focus is on the medium access control layer since it gives a fine-grained control on managing channel access and reducing energy waste. The goal of this dissertation is to design and evaluate a suite of channel access schemes that ensure graceful performance degradation in special-purpose DISNs as the network traffic load increases.First, we present a case study that investigates two distinct MAC proposals based on random access and scheduling access. The results of the case study provide the motivation to develop hybrid access schemes. Next, we introduce novel hybrid channel access protocols for DISNs ranging from a simple randomized transmission scheme that is robust under channel and topology dynamics to one that utilizes limited topological information about neighboring sensors to minimize collisions and energy waste. The protocols combine randomized transmission with heuristic scheduling to alleviate network performance degradation due to excessive collisions and retransmissions. We then propose a grid-based access scheduling protocol for a mobile DISN that is scalable and decentralized. The grid-based protocol efficiently handles sensor mobility with acceptable data loss and limited overhead. Finally, we extend the randomized transmission protocol from the hybrid approaches to develop an adaptable probability-based data transmission method. This work combines probabilistic transmission with heuristics, i.e., Latin Squares and a grid network, to tune transmission probabilities of sensors, thus meeting specific performance objectives in DISNs. We perform analytical evaluations and run simulation-based examinations to test all of the proposed protocols