A cooperative vehicular network framework

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks are networks characterized by intermittent connectivity and rapid changes in their topology. This paper addresses car-to-road communications in which vehicles use Access Points (AP) in a Delay Tolerant Network architecture. Results show how the combination of a Delay-Cooperative ARQ mechanism reduces packet losses and in conjunction with a Carry-and-Forward cooperative mechanism improves performance parameters in terms of total file transfer delay and number of AP needed to download files.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Optimal Content Downloading in Vehicular Networks

We consider a system where users aboard communication-enabled vehicles are interested in downloading different contents from Internet-based servers. This scenario captures many of the infotainment services that vehicular communication is envisioned to enable, including news reporting, navigation maps and software updating, or multimedia file downloading. In this paper, we outline the performance limits of such a vehicular content downloading system by modelling the downloading process as an optimization problem, and maximizing the overall system throughput. Our approach allows us to investigate the impact of different factors, such as the roadside infrastructure deployment, the vehicle-to-vehicle relaying, and the penetration rate of the communication technology, even in presence of large instances of the problem. Results highlight the existence of two operational regimes at different penetration rates and the importance of an efficient, yet 2-hop constrained, vehicle-to-vehicle relaying

A Survey on platoon-based vehicular cyber-physical systems

Vehicles on the road with some common interests can cooperatively form a platoon-based driving pattern, in which a vehicle follows another one and maintains a small and nearly constant distance to the preceding vehicle. It has been proved that, compared to driving individually, such a platoon-based driving pattern can significantly improve the road capacity and energy efficiency. Moreover, with the emerging vehicular adhoc network (VANET), the performance of platoon in terms of road capacity, safety and energy efficiency, etc., can be further improved. On the other hand, the physical dynamics of vehicles inside the platoon can also affect the performance of VANET. Such a complex system can be considered as a platoon-based vehicular cyber-physical system (VCPS), which has attracted significant attention recently. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on platoon-based VCPS. We first review the related work of platoon-based VCPS. We then introduce two elementary techniques involved in platoon-based VCPS: the vehicular networking architecture and standards, and traffic dynamics, respectively. We further discuss the fundamental issues in platoon-based VCPS, including vehicle platooning/clustering, cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC), platoon-based vehicular communications, etc., and all of which are characterized by the tight coupled relationship between traffic dynamics and VANET behaviors. Since system verification is critical to VCPS development, we also give an overview of VCPS simulation tools. Finally, we share our view on some open issues that may lead to new research directions

FAIR: Towards Impartial Resource Allocation for Intelligent Vehicles with Automotive Edge Computing

The emerging vehicular connected applications, such as cooperative automated driving and intersection collision warning, show great potentials to improve the driving safety, where vehicles can share the data collected by a variety of on-board sensors with surrounding vehicles and roadside infrastructures. Transmitting and processing this huge amount of sensory data introduces new challenges for automotive edge computing with traditional wireless communication networks. In this work, we address the problem of traditional asymmetrical network resource allocation for uplink and downlink connections that can significantly degrade the performance of vehicular connected applications. An end-to-end automotive edge networking system, FAIR, is proposed to provide fast, scalable, and impartial connected services for intelligent vehicles with edge computing, which can be applied to any traffic scenes and road topology. The core of FAIR is our proposed symmetrical network resource allocation algorithm deployed at edge servers and service adaptation algorithm equipped on intelligent vehicles. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate our proposed FAIR by leveraging real-world traffic dataset. Simulation results demonstrate that FAIR outperforms existing solutions in a variety of traffic scenes and road topology.Comment: This is a personal copy of the authors. Not for redistribution. The final version of this paper was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicle

On Content-centric Wireless Delivery Networks

The flux of social media and the convenience of mobile connectivity has created a mobile data phenomenon that is expected to overwhelm the mobile cellular networks in the foreseeable future. Despite the advent of 4G/LTE, the growth rate of wireless data has far exceeded the capacity increase of the mobile networks. A fundamentally new design paradigm is required to tackle the ever-growing wireless data challenge. In this article, we investigate the problem of massive content delivery over wireless networks and present a systematic view on content-centric network design and its underlying challenges. Towards this end, we first review some of the recent advancements in Information Centric Networking (ICN) which provides the basis on how media contents can be labeled, distributed, and placed across the networks. We then formulate the content delivery task into a content rate maximization problem over a share wireless channel, which, contrasting the conventional wisdom that attempts to increase the bit-rate of a unicast system, maximizes the content delivery capability with a fixed amount of wireless resources. This conceptually simple change enables us to exploit the "content diversity" and the "network diversity" by leveraging the abundant computation sources (through application-layer encoding, pushing and caching, etc.) within the existing wireless networks. A network architecture that enables wireless network crowdsourcing for content delivery is then described, followed by an exemplary campus wireless network that encompasses the above concepts.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures,accepted by IEEE Wireless Communications,Sept.201

Cooperative download in urban vehicular networks

We target urban scenarios where vehicular users can download large files from road-side Access Points (APs), and define a framework to exploit opportunistic encounters between mobile nodes to increase their transfer rate. We first devise a technique for APs deployment, based on vehicular traffic flows analysis, which fosters cooperative download. Then, we propose and evaluate different algorithms for carriers selection and chunk scheduling in carry&forward data transfers. Results obtained under realistic road topology and vehicular mobility conditions show that coupling our APs deployment scheme with probabilistic carriers selection and redundant chunk scheduling yields a worstcase 2x gain in the average download rate with respect to direct download, as well as a lOx reduction in the rate of undelivered chunks with respect to a blind carry&forward.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Design and analysis of a beacon-less routing protocol for large volume content dissemination in vehicular ad hoc networks

Largevolumecontentdisseminationispursuedbythegrowingnumberofhighquality applications for Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks(VANETs), e.g., the live road surveillance service and the video-based overtaking assistant service. For the highly dynamical vehicular network topology, beacon-less routing protocols have been proven to be efficient in achieving a balance between the system performance and the control overhead. However, to the authors’ best knowledge, the routing design for large volume content has not been well considered in the previous work, which will introduce new challenges, e.g., the enhanced connectivity requirement for a radio link. In this paper, a link Lifetime-aware Beacon-less Routing Protocol (LBRP) is designed for large volume content delivery in VANETs. Each vehicle makes the forwarding decision based on the message header information and its current state, including the speed and position information. A semi-Markov process analytical model is proposed to evaluate the expected delay in constructing one routing path for LBRP. Simulations show that the proposed LBRP scheme outperforms the traditional dissemination protocols in providing a low end-to-end delay. The analytical model is shown to exhibit a good match on the delay estimation with Monte Carlo simulations, as well

Smart infrastructure design for Smart Cities

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is one of the keywords to describe smart cities, aiming at efficient public transport, smart parking, enhanced road safety, intelligent traffic management, onvehicle entertainment, and so on. In ITS, Roadside Unit (RSU) deployment should be well-designed due to it serves as a service provider and a gateway to the Internet for vehicular users. In this article, we propose an RSU deployment strategy which maximizes the communication coverage and reduces the energy consumption of RSUs, simultaneously. We first formulate a multi-objective optimization RSU deployment problem and solve it by an evolutionary algorithm. Then we conduct extensive simulations and simulation results demonstrate that our proposed strategy significantly improves both the energy efficiency and the network connectivity