Connectivity of confined 3D Networks with Anisotropically Radiating Nodes

Nodes in ad hoc networks with randomly oriented directional antenna patterns typically have fewer short links and more long links which can bridge together otherwise isolated subnetworks. This network feature is known to improve overall connectivity in 2D random networks operating at low channel path loss. To this end, we advance recently established results to obtain analytic expressions for the mean degree of 3D networks for simple but practical anisotropic gain profiles, including those of patch, dipole and end-fire array antennas. Our analysis reveals that for homogeneous systems (i.e. neglecting boundary effects) directional radiation patterns are superior to the isotropic case only when the path loss exponent is less than the spatial dimension. Moreover, we establish that ad hoc networks utilizing directional transmit and isotropic receive antennas (or vice versa) are always sub-optimally connected regardless of the environment path loss. We extend our analysis to investigate boundary effects in inhomogeneous systems, and study the geometrical reasons why directional radiating nodes are at a disadvantage to isotropic ones. Finally, we discuss multi-directional gain patterns consisting of many equally spaced lobes which could be used to mitigate boundary effects and improve overall network connectivity.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figure

The Dynamics of Vehicular Networks in Urban Environments

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) have emerged as a platform to support intelligent inter-vehicle communication and improve traffic safety and performance. The road-constrained, high mobility of vehicles, their unbounded power source, and the emergence of roadside wireless infrastructures make VANETs a challenging research topic. A key to the development of protocols for inter-vehicle communication and services lies in the knowledge of the topological characteristics of the VANET communication graph. This paper explores the dynamics of VANETs in urban environments and investigates the impact of these findings in the design of VANET routing protocols. Using both real and realistic mobility traces, we study the networking shape of VANETs under different transmission and market penetration ranges. Given that a number of RSUs have to be deployed for disseminating information to vehicles in an urban area, we also study their impact on vehicular connectivity. Through extensive simulations we investigate the performance of VANET routing protocols by exploiting the knowledge of VANET graphs analysis.Comment: Revised our testbed with even more realistic mobility traces. Used the location of real Wi-Fi hotspots to simulate RSUs in our study. Used a larger, real mobility trace set, from taxis in Shanghai. Examine the implications of our findings in the design of VANET routing protocols by implementing in ns-3 two routing protocols (GPCR & VADD). Updated the bibliography section with new research work

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1 VANETs can be based on vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and/or vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. 2 V2X is an abbreviation used for both V2I and V2V communications. 3 The price quote includes the cost of both roadside equipment and roadside wireless communications. INTRODUCTION Successful deployment of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) where information (e.g., traffic, road information, and safety messages) is sent, forwarded, and received by vehicles depends on the adoption of a new wireless technology, dedicated short-range communications (DSRC). Since it is anticipated that DSRC technology might be a mandate for modern vehicles effective 2017, with high probability, vehicle-toinfrastructure (V2I) communications-based networks will be the first type of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) 1 that might be implemented and, as such, could accelerate the adoption of DSRC. Besides V2I applications (e.g., Internet access), additional infrastructure can also be used to improve connectivity of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) networks. In addition to growing demand for V2X traffic 2 and the fact that V2V applications are confined to a particular geographical area, installing special roadside units (RSUs) has emerged as an attractive solution (especially to the U.S. Department of Transportation) for providing infrastructure support as RSUs limit information to being disseminated within a confined area, thus resulting in smaller message delay, better information security, and possibly lower communications cost. While RSUs seem to be a very promising solution for improving V2V communications, the cost of manufacturing, installing, and maintaining these units seem to be prohibitive for the large-scale deployment of RSUs. For example, a simplistic form of RSU (e.g., roadway probe beacons) requires $13,000-$15,000 per unit capital cost and up to $2400 per unit per year 3 for operation and maintenance PROBLEM STATEMENT The U.S. Department of Transportation (DoT) was expected to have nationwide deployment of the roadside infrastructure in 2008 [4]. This plan, however, did not materialize, and to date very few RSUs have been deployed. The major reasons that prevented the success of the plan are summarized below. JUSTIFYING THE BENEFITS THAT RSUS PROVIDE IS DIFFICULT Determining the value of such a radical proposition in uncertain future markets has proven to be nontrivial and fairly complicated. Even though the benefits of V2V and V2I systems in terms of safety, traffic efficiency, and environment are clear and have been reported in ABSTRACT Deploying roadside units, RSUs, for increasing the connectivity of vehicular ad hoc networks is deemed necessary for coping with the partial penetration of DSRC radios into the market in the initial stages of DSRC deployment. Several factors, including cost, complexity, existing systems, and lack of cooperation between government and private sectors, have impeded the deployment of RSUs. In this article, we propose to solve this formidable problem by using a biologically inspired self-organizing network approach whereby certain vehicles serve as RSUs. The proposed solution is based on designing local rules and the corresponding algorithms that implement them. Results show that the proposed approach can increase the message reachability and connectivity substantially

Cars as roadside units: a selforganizing network solution

Abstract Deploying Roadside Units (RSUs) for increasing the connectivity of vehicular ad hoc networks is deemed necessary for coping with the partial penetration of Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) radios into the market at the initial stages of DSRC deployment. Several factors including cost, complexity, existing systems, and lack of cooperation between government and private sectors have impeded the deployment of RSUs. In this paper, we propose to solve this formidable problem by using a biologically inspired self-organizing network approach whereby certain vehicles serve as RSUs. The proposed solution is based on designing local rules and the corresponding algorithms that implement such local rules. Results show that the proposed approach can increase the message reachability and connectivity substantially

Enhanced snr-based admission control algorithm for vehicular ad-hoc network

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) becomes a fundamental subcategory of mobile ad-hoc networks that provides vehicles to communicate with each other and with roadside infrastructure smartly. Data traffic in VANET can be categorized into safety and non-safety, where safety is a very critical point and non-safety is related to entertainment. Various VANET performance challenges are considered in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) which cause performance degradation as performance anomaly where high rates of vehicles wait for the low rates of vehicle transmitting time and starvation problem where some vehicles cannot transfer their data. Three main achievements have been accomplished. Starting with the impact of the increasing vehicle speed on performance anomaly problem consequences has been investigated. Followed by high-speed effects on data delivery is illustrated and how 802.11p has outperformed 802.11 in terms of data delivery is also demonstrated. Lastly, starvation problem is investigated where results showed increased data loss when vehicle nodes unable to deliver data correctly. Finally, a QoS-aware Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) admission control mechanism (QASAC) is proposed to handle the performance anomaly problem while maintaining the QoS levels for high and low traffics. This can result in wasting throughput and cause data loss. The investigation results show that 802.11p has enhanced the number of dropped packets up to 70%. Also, the 802.11p end to end delay has decreased up to 12% less than the results of the 802.11 MAC protocol. The packet delivery ratio has been enhanced by up to 41% by 802.11p. The starvation problem investigation phase shows that 802.11p perform better than 802.11 which mainly affected by the increased speed of the vehicle. QASAC assigned different SNR values to different vehicles group based on the sending SNR values and in each group. Unlike recently proposed admission control in VANET networks, the proposed architecture differentiate between both high priority and low priority traffic QASAC has been compared against the latest SNR based admission control mechanism. QASAC has enhanced the performance of data delivery up to 23% in terms of data dropping rates for high priority traffic

On the Topology of a Large-scale Urban Vehicular Network

Despite the growing interest in a real-world deployment of vehicle-to-vehicle communication, the topological features of the resulting vehicular network remain largely unknown. We lack a clear under- standing of the level of connectivity achievable in large-scale scenarios, the availability and reliability of connected multi-hop paths, or the impact of daytime. In this paper, we adopt a complex network approach to provide a first characterization of a realistic large-scale urban vehicular ad hoc network. We unveil the low connectivity, availability, reliability and navigability of the network, and exploit our findings to derive network design guidelines

Connectivity-Aware Routing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is a promising emerging technology that enables a wide range of appealing applications in road safety, traffic management, and passengers and driver comfort. The deployment of VANETs to enable vehicular Internet-based services and mobile data offloading is also envisioned to be a promising solution for the great demand of mobile Internet access. However, developing reliable and efficient routing protocols is one of the key challenges in VANETs due to the high vehicle mobility and frequent network topology changes. In this thesis, we highlight the routing challenges in VANETs with a focus on position-based routing (PBR), as a well-recognized routing paradigm in the vehicular environment. As the current PBR protocols do not support VANET users with connectivity information, our goal is to design an efficient routing protocol for VANETs that dynamically finds long life paths, with reduced delivery delay, and supports vehicles with instant information about connectivity to the infrastructure. The focus of this thesis will be on predicting vehicular mobility to estimate inter-vehicle link duration in order to support routing protocols with proactive connectivity information for a better routing performance. Via three stages to meet our goal, we propose three novel routing protocols to estimate both broad and comprehensive connectivities in VANETs: iCAR, iCAR-II, and D-CAR. iCAR supports VANET users with instant broad connectivity information to surrounding road intersections, iCAR-II uses cellular network channels for comprehensive connectivity awareness to Roadside Units (RSUs), and finally D-CAR supports users with instant comprehensive connectivity information without the assistance of other networks. Detailed analysis and simulation based evaluations of our proposed protocols demonstrate the validity of using VANETs for Internet-based services and mobile data offloading in addition to the significant improvement of VANETs performance in terms of packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay

Opportunistic Spectrum Utilization for Vehicular Communication Networks

Recently, vehicular networks (VANETs), has become the key technology of the next-generation intelligent transportation systems (ITS). By incorporating wireless communication and networking capabilities into automobiles, information can be efficiently and reliably disseminated among vehicles, road side units, and infrastructure, which enables a number of novel applications enhancing the road safety and providing the drivers/passengers with an information-rich environment. With the development of mobile Internet, people want to enjoy the Internet access in vehicles just as anywhere else. This fact, along with the soaring number of connected vehicles and the emerging data-craving applications and services, has led to a problem of spectrum scarcity, as the current spectrum bands for VANETs are difficult to accommodate the increasing mobile data demands. In this thesis, we aim to solve this problem by utilizing extra spectrum bands, which are not originally allocated for vehicular communications. In this case, the spectrum usage is based on an opportunistic manner, where the spectrum is not available if the primary system is active, or the vehicle is outside the service coverage due to the high mobility. We will analyze the features of such opportunistic spectrum, and design efficient protocols to utilize the spectrum for VANETs. Firstly, the application of cognitive radio technologies in VANETs, termed CR-VANETs, is proposed and analyzed. In CR-VANETs, the channel availability is severely affected by the street patterns and the mobility features of vehicles. Therefore, we theoretically analyze the channel availability in urban scenario, and obtain its statistics. Based on the knowledge of channel availability, an efficient channel access scheme for CR-VANETs is then designed and evaluated. Secondly, using WiFi to deliver mobile data, named WiFi offloading, is employed to deliver the mobile data on the road, in order to relieve the burden of the cellular networks, and provide vehicular users with a cost-effective data pipe. Using queueing theory, we analyze the offloading performance with respect to the vehicle mobility model and the users' QoS preferences. Thirdly, we employ device-to-device (D2D) communications in VANETs to further improve the spectrum efficiency. In a vehicular D2D (V-D2D) underlaying cellular network, proximate vehicles can directly communicate with each other with a relatively small transmit power, rather than traversing the base station. Therefore, many current transmissions can co-exist on one spectrum resource block. By utilizing the spatial diversity, the spectrum utilization is greatly enhanced. We study the performance of the V-D2D underlaying cellular network, considering the vehicle mobility and the street pattern. We also investigate the impact of the preference of D2D/cellular mode on the interference and network throughput, and obtain the theoretical results. In summary, the analysis and schemes developed in this thesis are useful to understand the future VANETs with heterogeneous access technologies, and provide important guidelines for designing and deploying such networks