Building a prototype VANET testbed to explore communication dynamics in highly mobile environments

Applications for VANETs will require seamless communication between vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle. However, this is challenging because this is a highly mobile environment. Therefore, traditional handover techniques are inadequate due to the high velocity of the vehicle and the small coverage radius of Road-side Units. Hence in order to have seamless communication for these applications, a proactive approach needs to be carefully investigated. This requires measurements from a real testbed in order to enhance our understanding of the communication dynamics. This paper is about building and evaluating a prototype VANET network on the Middlesex University Hendon Campus, London to explore these issues. The testbed is being used to investigate better propagation models, road-critical safety applications as well as algorithms for traffic management. In addition, the Network Dwell Time of vehicles travelling in the coverage of the RSUs is measured to explore proactive handover and resource allocation mechanisms

Building a prototype VANET testbed to explore communication dynamics in highly mobile environments

Applications for VANETs will require seamless communication between vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle. However, this is challenging because this is a highly mobile environment. Therefore, traditional handover techniques are inadequate due to the high velocity of the vehicle and the small coverage radius of Road-side Units. Hence in order to have seamless communication for these applications, a proactive approach needs to be carefully investigated. This requires measurements from a real testbed in order to enhance our understanding of the communication dynamics. This paper is about building and evaluating a prototype VANET network on the Middlesex University Hendon Campus, London to explore these issues. The testbed is being used to investigate better propagation models, road-critical safety applications as well as algorithms for traffic management. In addition, the Network Dwell Time of vehicles travelling in the coverage of the RSUs is measured to explore proactive handover and resource allocation mechanisms

Investigating seamless handover in VANET systems

Wireless communications have been extensively studied for several decades, which has led to various new advancements, including new technologies in the field of Intelligent Transport Systems. Vehicular Ad hoc Networks or VANETs are considered to be a long-term solution, contributing significantly towards Intelligent Transport Systems in providing access to critical life-safety applications and infotainment services. These services will require ubiquitous connectivity and hence there is a need to explore seamless handover mechanisms. Although VANETs are attracting greater commercial interest, current research has not adequately captured the realworld constraints in Vehicular Ad hoc Network handover techniques. Due to the high velocity of the vehicles and smaller coverage distances, there are serious challenges in providing seamless handover from one Road Side Unit (RSU) to another and this comes at the cost of overlapping signals of adjacent RSUs. Therefore, a framework is needed to be able to calculate the regions of overlap in adjacent RSU coverage ranges to guarantee ubiquitous connectivity. This thesis is about providing such a framework by analysing in detail the communication mechanisms in a VANET network, firstly by means of simulations using the VEINs framework via OMNeT++ and then using analytical analysis of the probability of successful packet reception. Some of the concepts of the Y-Comm architecture such as Network Dwell Time, Time Before Handover and Exit Times have been used to provide a framework to investigate handover issues and these parameters are also used in this thesis to explore handover in highly mobile environments such as VANETs. Initial investigation showed that seamless communication was dependant on the beacon frequency, length of the beacon and the velocity of the vehicle. The effects of each of these parameters are explored in detail and results are presented which show the need for a more probabilistic approach to handover based on cumulative probability of successful packet reception. In addition, this work shows how the length of the beacon affects the rate of change of the Signal-to-Noise ratio or SNR as the vehicle approaches the Road-Side Unit. However, the velocity of the vehicle affects both the cumulative probability as well as the Signal-to-Noise ratio as the vehicle approaches the Road-Side Unit. The results of this work will enable systems that can provide ubiquitous connectivity via seamless handover using proactive techniques because traditional models of handover are unable to cope with the high velocity of the vehicles and relatively small area of coverage in these environments. Finally, a testbed has been set-up at the Middlesex University, Hendon campus for the purpose of achieving a better understanding of VANET systems operating in an urban environment. Using the testbed, it was observed that environmental effects have to be taken into considerations in real-time deployment studies to see how these parameters can affect the performance of VANET systems under different scenarios. This work also highlights the fact that in order to build a practical system better propagation models are required in the urban context for highly mobile environments such as VANETs

Exploring intelligent service migration in a highly mobile network

Mobile services allow services to be migrated or replicated closer to users as they move around. This is now regarded as a viable mechanism to provide good Quality of Service to users in highly mobile environments such as vehicular networks. The vehicular environment is rapidly becoming a significant part of the internet and this presents various challenges that must be addressed; this is due to continuous handovers as mobile devices change their point of attachment to these networks resulting in a loss of service. Therefore, this explains the need to build a framework for intelligent service migration. This thesis addresses these issues. It starts by discussing the requirements for intelligent service migration. Then it investigates a low latency Quality of Service Aware Framework as well as an experimental transport protocol that would be favoured by vehicular networks. Furthermore, two analytical models are developed using the Zero-Server Markov Chain technique which is a way of analysing scenarios when the server is not continuously available to serve. Using the Zero-Server Markov Chain, the first analytical model looks at lost service due to continuous handovers and the communication dynamics of vehicular networks, while the second model analyses how service migration affects service delivery in these networks. Formulas are developed to yield the average number of packets in the system, the response time, the probability of blocking and a new parameter called the probability of lost service. These formulas are then applied to the Middlesex VANET Testbed to look at reactive and proactive service migration. These techniques are then incorporated into a new Service Management Framework to provide sustainable Quality of Service and Quality of Experience to mobile users in vehicular networks. This thesis also shows that this new approach is better than current approaches as it addresses key issues in intelligent service migration in such environments, and hence can play a significant part in the development of Intelligent Transport Systems for Smart Cities

Building an Intelligent Transport Information Platform for Smart Cities

Intelligent Transportation management is a key requirement in the development of Smart Cities. This can be realised with a new technology known as Vehicular Ad hoc Networks or VANETs. VANETs allow us to integrate our transport and communication infrastructures through communication devices deployed along the roads called Roadside Units (RSUs). The RSUs talk to a device in your car called an Onboard Unit (OBU). OBUs can exchange information with RSUs as well as with each other, and because VANETs have been engineered to deliver information quickly and reliably, they can be used in a number of safety-critical areas such as collision avoidance, accident notification and disaster management. This project was about building and evaluating a prototype VANET network on the Middlesex University Hendon Campus and surrounding roads. The information from this VANET Testbed was stored and processed using a Cloud platform at Middlesex University, enabling visual and data analytics to be applied in order to provide an intelligent platform for transport management

Exploring intelligent service migration in vehicular networks

Mobile edge clouds have great potential to address the challenges in vehicular networks by transferring storage and computing functions to the cloud. This brings many advantages of the cloud closer to the mobile user, by installing small cloud infrastructures at the network edge. However, it is still a challenge to efficiently utilize heterogeneous communication and edge computing architectures. In this paper, we investigate the impact of live service migration within a Vehicular Ad-hoc Network environment by making use of the results collected from a real experimental test-bed. A new proactive service migration model which considers both the mobility of the user and the service migration time for different services is introduced. Results collected from a real experimental test-bed of connected vehicles show that there is a need to explore proactive service migration based on the mobility of users. This can result in better resource usage and better Quality of Service for the mobile user. Additionally, a study on the performance of the transport protocol and its impact in the context of live service migration for highly mobile environments is presented with results in terms of latency, bandwidth, and burst and their potential effect on the time it takes to migrate services

Exploring a resource allocation security protocol for secure service migration in commercial cloud environments

Recently, there has been a significant increase in the popularity of cloud computing systems that offer Cloud services such as Networks, Servers, Storage, Applications, and other available on-demand re-sources or pay-as-you-go systems with different speeds and Qualities of Service. These cloud computing environments share resources by providing virtualization techniques that enable a single user to ac-cess various Cloud Services Thus, cloud users have access to an infi-nite computing resource, allowing them to increase or decrease their resource consumption capacity as needed. However, an increasing number of Commercial Cloud Services are available in the market-place from a wide range of Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). As a result, most CSPs must deal with dynamic resource allocation, in which mobile services migrate from one cloud environment to another to provide heterogeneous resources based on user requirements. A new service framework has been proposed by Sardis about how ser-vices can be migrated in Cloud Infrastructure. However, it does not address security and privacy issues in the migration process. Fur-thermore, there is still a lack of heuristic algorithms that can check requested and available resources to allocate and deallocate before the secure migration begins. The advent of Virtual machine technol-ogy, for example, VMware, and container technology, such as Docker, LXD, and Unikernels has made the migration of services possible. As Cloud services, such as Vehicular Cloud, are now being increasingly offered in highly mobile environments, Y-Comm, a new framework for building future mobile systems, has developed proactive handover to support the mobile user. Though there are many mechanisms in place to provide support for mobile services, one way of addressing the challenges arising because of this emerging application is to move the computing resources closer to the end-users and find how much computing resources should be allocated to meet the performance re-quirements/demands. This work addresses the above challenges by proposing the development of resource allocation security protocols for secure service migration that allow the safe transfer of servers and monitoring of the capacity of requested resources to different Cloud environments. In this thesis, we propose a Resource Allocation Secu-rity Protocol for secure service migration that allows resources to be allocated efficiently is analyzed. In our research, we use two differ-ent formal modelling and verification techniques to verify an abstract protocol and validate the security properties such as secrecy, authen-tication, and key exchange for secure service migration. The new protocol has been verified in AVISPA and ProVerif formal verifier and is being implemented in a new Service Management Framework Prototype to securely manage and allocate resources in Commercial Cloud Environments. And then, a Capability-Based Secure Service Protocol (SSP) was developed to ensure that capability-based service protocol proves secrecy, authentication, and authorization, and that it can be applied to any service. A basic prototype was then devel-oped to test these ideas using a block storage system known as the Network Memory Service. This service was used as the backend of a FUSE filesystem. The results show that this approach can be safely implemented and should perform well in real environments

Exploring intelligent service migration in vehicular networks

Mobile edge clouds have great potential to address the challenges in vehicular networks by transferring storage and computing functions to the cloud. This brings many advantages of the cloud closer to the mobile user, by installing small cloud infrastructures at the network edge. However, it is still a challenge to efficiently utilize heterogeneous communication and edge computing architectures. In this paper, we investigate the impact of live service migration within a Vehicular Ad-hoc Network environment by making use of the results collected from a real experimental test-bed. A new proactive service migration model which considers both the mobility of the user and the service migration time for different services is introduced. Results collected from a real experimental test-bed of connected vehicles show that there is a need to explore proactive service migration based on the mobility of users. This can result in better resource usage and better Quality of Service for the mobile user. Additionally, a study on the performance of the transport protocol and its impact in the context of live service migration for highly mobile environments is presented with results in terms of latency, bandwidth, and burst and their potential effect on the time it takes to migrate services