A new approach on communications architectures for intelligent transportation systems

A Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET) is a generic communications conceptualization that can be applied to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and its main goal is to allow exchange of information between moving vehicles, fixed infrastructures, pedestrians with personal devices, and all other electronic devices able to connect to a VANET environment. Information exchange between different stakeholders brings a relevant potential to the development of applications to help users in different areas such as traffic safety and efficiency, infotainment and personal comfort. However, due to the expected heterogeneity (different processing power and storage capabilities, communications technologies and mobility patterns) and large scale on the number of devices involved, application interoperability in VANET contexts can be a challenging problem. Non-agnostic standard communications architectures for ITS systems have some deploying limitations and lack important specific implementation details. This paper presents an agnostic VANET architecture (it permits the use of several communication technologies in an open and modular framework), which is an adaption of present standards approach, to be deployed on ITS systems as a mean to overcome their main limitations. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.This work has been sponsored by the Portugal Incentive System for Research and Technological Development. Project in co-promotion no 002797/2015 (INNOVCAR 2015-2018), and also by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013

The Fog Makes Sense: Enabling Social Sensing Services With Limited Internet Connectivity

Social sensing services use humans as sensor carriers, sensor operators and sensors themselves in order to provide situation-awareness to applications. This promises to provide a multitude of benefits to the users, for example in the management of natural disasters or in community empowerment. However, current social sensing services depend on Internet connectivity since the services are deployed on central Cloud platforms. In many circumstances, Internet connectivity is constrained, for instance when a natural disaster causes Internet outages or when people do not have Internet access due to economical reasons. In this paper, we propose the emerging Fog Computing infrastructure to become a key-enabler of social sensing services in situations of constrained Internet connectivity. To this end, we develop a generic architecture and API of Fog-enabled social sensing services. We exemplify the usage of the proposed social sensing architecture on a number of concrete use cases from two different scenarios.Comment: Ruben Mayer, Harshit Gupta, Enrique Saurez, and Umakishore Ramachandran. 2017. The Fog Makes Sense: Enabling Social Sensing Services With Limited Internet Connectivity. In Proceedings of The 2nd International Workshop on Social Sensing, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, April 21 2017 (SocialSens'17), 6 page

Architecture and evaluation of a unified V2V and V2I communication system based on cellular networks

Vehicle communications are becoming the cornerstone in the future vehicle equipment. More specifically, vehicle to vehicle communications (V2V) are the main object of researching nowadays, because vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) approximations are already being developed as commercial solutions. Cellular networks (CN) are usually applied in V2I solutions, whereas ad hoc networks are practically the only technology considered in V2V communications. Due to fact that CN are currently a reality and the operators are continuously improving the network, this communication technology could be considered as a candidate to deal with V2V necessities as well. The present paper defends the applicability of CN in the V2V field, and presents a novel communication paradigm for vehicles which unifies both V2V and V2I paradigms into one system. A peer to peer network technology has been used over the CN basis to create a group-based communication infrastructure which enables the message propagation among vehicles and between the car and the road side infrastructure. The architecture has been implemented in both hardware and software terms, and multitude of field tests have been carried out, whose main performance results are shown in the paper.The authors would like to thank the Spanish Ministerio the Educacion y Ciencia for sponsoring the research activities under the grant AP2005-1437, in frames of the FPU program, and to the financial support given by the European Spatial Agency (ESA) under the GIROADS 332599 project. Special thanks as well to the Spanish Ministerio the Fomento for its continuous support in vehicular researching

TACASHI: Trust-Aware Communication Architecture for Social Internet of Vehicles

[EN] The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has emerged as a new spin-off research theme from traditional vehicular ad hoc networks. It employs vehicular nodes connected to other smart objects equipped with a powerful multisensor platform, communication technologies, and IP-based connectivity to the Internet, thereby creating a possible social network called Social IoV (SIoV). Ensuring the required trustiness among communicating entities is an important task in such heterogeneous networks, especially for safety-related applications. Thus, in addition to securing intervehicle communication, the driver/passengers honesty factor must also be considered, since they could tamper the system in order to provoke unwanted situations. To bridge the gaps between these two paradigms, we envision to connect SIoV and online social networks (OSNs) for the purpose of estimating the drivers and passengers honesty based on their OSN profiles. Furthermore, we compare the current location of the vehicles with their estimated path based on their historical mobility profile. We combine SIoV, path-based and OSN-based trusts to compute the overall trust for different vehicles and their current users. As a result, we propose a trust-aware communication architecture for social IoV (TACASHI). TACASHI offers a trust-aware social in-vehicle and intervehicle communication architecture for SIoV considering also the drivers honesty factor based on OSN. Extensive simulation results evidence the efficiency of our proposal, ensuring high detection ratios >87% and high accuracy with reduced error ratios, clearly outperforming previous proposals, known as RTM and AD-IoV.Kerrache, CA.; Lagraa, N.; Hussain, R.; Ahmed, SH.; Benslimane, A.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Cano, J.... (2019). TACASHI: Trust-Aware Communication Architecture for Social Internet of Vehicles. IEEE Internet of Things. 6(4):5870-5877. https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2018.2880332S587058776

Incorporating the GEMV2 geometry-based vehicle-to-vehicle radio propagation channe model into de artery simulation framework for vanet applications

Orientador: Prof. Dr. Evelio Martin Garcia FernándezCoorientador: Prof. Dr. Christian FacchiDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal do Paraná, Setor de Ciências Exatas, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia Elétrica e e em Engenharia Automotiva Internacional, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e Ciências da Computação, Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt. Defesa : Curitiba, 27/08/2018Inclui referências: p.70-73Resumo: A comunicação veicular tem como principal objetivo a otimização do tráfego e a diminuição de acidentes nas estradas. Como trata-se de um item de segurança, é necessário que o sistema seja massivamente testado em diversas situações possíveis antes de ser colocado em prática, o que tornaria a aplicação inviável devido ao elevado custo e ao tempo. Através de simuladores computacionais é possível realizar essa operação mais eficientemente assim como confibializar o sistema como um todo. Para isso é necessário que o simulador veicular possua uma precisão mais próxima da realidade possível com uma alta escabilidade, entretanto, com um processo computacional executável. Nesse contexto, essa dissertação tem o objetivo de tornar o ambiente virtual mais realístico através da implantação de um modelo de rádio propagação propício para o ambiente veicular, o qual diferencia dos modelos tradicionais devido à alta mobilidade dos comunicantes (carros) em alta velocidade e o impacto dos mesmos na comunicação. Como simulador, foi utilizado o framework de simulação Artery, o qual é uma extensão melhorada do VEINS uma vez que agrega as funcionalidades de comunicação europeia VANET no mesmo e aumenta sua escabilidade. Além disso o Artery faz uso do Vanetza, o qual é responsável pela implementação da pilha de protocolo do ETSI ITS-G5. Tanto o Artery e Vanetza são desenvolvidos sob a plataforma Omnet++ e possuem licença de código aberto. O GEMV² é um modelo de rádio propagação determinístico e estocástico, o qual considera o impacto dos demais veículos sobre o canal de comunicação veicular. Além disso, apresenta um modelo eficiente para realísticas simulações em larga escala com milhares de veículos comunicantes em vários ambientes veiculares (urbano, rural, rodovia). Além disso apresenta um ótimo tradeoff entre escabilidade e precisão, tendo seu modelo validado através de medições de campo. Após a implementação do modelo GEMV² na estrutura de simulação Artery constatou-se uma alta sensibilidade do mesmo para variações no posicionamento da antena e do carro por si só, e assim como previsto, uma melhora aproximadamente de 82,3 dB na potência recebida se comparado com modelos tradicionais de rádio propagação usados até então no Artery, justificados pelas considerações geométricas que o modelo aplica. Palavras-chave: VANET, Artery, GEMV², modelo de rádio propagação veicular, framework de simulação. Omnet. MATLAB.Abstract: The main goal of vehicular communication is the traffic optimization and the reduction of accidents on the roads. Since it is a safety item, it is recommended that the system is massively tested in several possible situations before being put into practice, which would become the application infeasible due to the high cost and time. Through computer simulations, it is possible to perform these operations more efficiently as well as getting the whole system more trustworthy. That said, it is necessary that the network and traffic based vehicular simulator has an accuracy as close to reality as possible and with a high scalability, however, with an executable computational process. As for the simulator, the Artery simulation framework was used, which is based on VEINS and enhances this by adding the European VANET communication functionality and by increasing its scalability. In addition, Artery makes use of Vanetza, which is an implementation of the ETSI ITS-G5 protocol stack. Both Artery and Vanetza were developed under the Omnet ++ platform as open source. In this context, this dissertation aims to become the virtual environment more realistic by implementing a radio propagation model that fits the vehicular environment, which differentiates from the traditional models due to the high mobility of the communicators (vehicles) at high speed and their impact over the communication channel. The GEMV² is a deterministic and stochastic radio propagation model, which considers the impact of the other vehicles over the vehicular communication channel. In addition, it presents an efficient model for realistic large-scale simulations with thousands of communicating vehicles in various vehicular environments (urban, rural, highway). Furthermore, it can achieve a good scalability/accuracy tradeoff, having its model validated through extensive field measurements. After the implementation of the GEMV² model into the Artery simulation framework was noticed that the model has a high sensitive in relation to the antenna position and the vehicle's positioning itself. Moreover, as expected, an improvement of approximately 82.3 dB at received power emerged if compared to the traditional radio propagation models used by Artery till then, justified by the geometric considerations that the model applies. Keywords: VANET, Artery, GEMV², vehicular radio propagation model, simulation framework. Omnet. MATLAB

Semantic reasoning in cognitive networks for heterogeneous wireless mesh systems

The next generation of wireless networks is expected to provide not only higher bandwidths anywhere and at any time but also ubiquitous communication using different network types. However, several important issues including routing, self-configuration, device management, and context awareness have to be considered before this vision becomes reality. This paper proposes a novel cognitive network framework for heterogeneous wireless mesh systems to abstract the network control system from the infrastructure by introducing a layer that separates the management of different radio access networks from the data transmission. This approach simplifies the process of managing and optimizing the networks by using extendable smart middleware that automatically manages, configures, and optimizes the network performance. The proposed cognitive network framework, called FuzzOnto, is based on a novel approach that employs ontologies and fuzzy reasoning to facilitate the dynamic addition of new network types to the heterogeneous network. The novelty is in using semantic reasoning with cross-layer parameters from heterogeneous network architectures to manage and optimize the performance of the networks. The concept is demonstrated through the use of three network architectures: 1) wireless mesh network; 2) long-term evolution (LTE) cellular network; and 3) vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). These networks utilize nonoverlapped frequency bands and can operate simultaneously with no interference. The proposed heterogeneous network was evaluated using ns-3 network simulation software. The simulation results were compared with those produced by other networks that utilize multiple transmission devices. The results showed that the heterogeneous network outperformed the benchmark networks in both urban and VANET scenarios by up to 70% of the network throughput, even when the LTE network utilized a high bandwidth