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

Coherent, automatic address resolution for vehicular ad hoc networks

Published in: Int. J. of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2017 Vol.25, No.3, pp.163 - 179. DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2017.10001935The interest in vehicular communications has increased notably. In this paper, the use of the address resolution (AR) procedures is studied for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). We analyse the poor performance of AR transactions in such networks and we present a new proposal called coherent, automatic address resolution (CAAR). Our approach inhibits the use of AR transactions and instead increases the usefulness of routing signalling to automatically match the IP and MAC addresses. Through extensive simulations in realistic VANET scenarios using the Estinet simulator, we compare our proposal CAAR to classical AR and to another of our proposals that enhances AR for mobile wireless networks, called AR+. In addition, we present a performance evaluation of the behaviour of CAAR, AR and AR+ with unicast traffic of a reporting service for VANETs. Results show that CAAR outperforms the other two solutions in terms of packet losses and furthermore, it does not introduce additional overhead.Postprint (published version

Implementation of CAVENET and its usage for performance evaluation of AODV, OLSR and DYMO protocols in vehicular networks

Vehicle Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a kind of Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) that establishes wireless connection between cars. In VANETs and MANETs, the topology of the network changes very often, therefore implementation of efficient routing protocols is very important problem. In MANETs, the Random Waypoint (RW) model is used as a simulation model for generating node mobility pattern. On the other hand, in VANETs, the mobility patterns of nodes is restricted along the roads, and is affected by the movement of neighbour nodes. In this paper, we present a simulation system for VANET called CAVENET (Cellular Automaton based VEhicular NETwork). In CAVENET, the mobility patterns of nodes are generated by an 1-dimensional cellular automata. We improved CAVENET and implemented some routing protocols. We investigated the performance of the implemented routing protocols by CAVENET. The simulation results have shown that DYMO protocol has better performance than AODV and OLSR protocols.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Contribution to the design of VANET routing protocols for realistic urban environments

One of the main concerns of the cities' administration is mobility management. In Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), pedestrians, vehicles and public transportation systems could share information and react to any situation in the city. The information sensed by vehicles could be useful for other vehicles and for the mobility authorities. Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) make possible the communication between vehicles (V2I) and also between vehicles and fixed infrastructure (V2I) managed by the city's authorities. In addition, VANET routing protocols minimize the use of fixed infrastructure since they employ multi-hop V2V communication to reach reporting access points of the city. This thesis aims to contribute in the design of VANET routing protocols to enable reporting services (e.g., vehicular traffic notifications) in urban environments. The first step to achieve this global objective has been the study of components and tools to mimic a realistic VANET scenario. Moreover, we have analyzed the impact of the realism of each one of those components in the simulation results. Then, we have improved the Address Resolution procedure in VANETs by including it in the routing signaling messages. Our approach simplifies the VANET operation and increases the packet delivery ratio as consequence. Afterwards, we have tackled the issue of having duplicate packets in unicast communications and we have proposed routing filters to lower their presence. This way we have been able to increase the available bandwidth and reduce the average packet delay with a slight increase of the packet losses. Besides, we have proposed a Multi-Metric Map aware routing protocol (MMMR) that incorporates four routing metrics (distance, trajectory, vehicle density and available bandwidth) to take the forwarding decisions. With the aim of increasing the number of delivered packets in MMMR, we have developed a Geographical Heuristic Routing (GHR) algorithm. GHR integrates Tabu and Simulated Annealing heuristic optimization techniques to adapt its behavior to the specific scenario characteristics. GHR is generic because it could use any geographical routing protocol to take the forwarding decisions. Additionally, we have designed an easy to implement forwarding strategy based on an extended topology information area of two hops, called 2-hops Geographical Anycast Routing (2hGAR) protocol. Results show that controlled randomness introduced by GHR improves the default operation of MMMR. On the other hand, 2hGAR presents lower delays than GHR and higher packet delivery ratio, especially in high density scenarios. Finally, we have proposed two mixed (integer and linear) optimization models to detect the best positions in the city to locate the Road Side Units (RSUs) which are in charge of gathering all the reporting information generated by vehicles.Una de las principales preocupaciones en la administración de las ciudades es la gestión de la movilidad de sus vehículos, debido a los problemas de tráfico como atascos y accidentes. En los sistemas inteligentes de transporte (SIT), peatones, vehículos y transporte público podrán compartir información y adaptarse a cualquier situación que suceda en la ciudad. La información obtenida por los sensores de los vehículos puede ser útil para otros vehículos y para las autoridades de movilidad. Las redes ad hoc vehiculares (VANETs) hacen posible la comunicación entre los propios vehículos (V2V) y entre vehículos y la infraestructura fija de la red de la ciudad (V2I). Asimismo, los protocolos de encaminamiento para redes vehiculares minimizan el uso de infraestructura fija de red, ya que los protocolos de encaminamiento VANET emplean comunicaciones multisalto entre vehículos para encaminar los mensajes hasta los puntos de acceso de la red en la ciudad. El objetivo de esta tesis doctoral es contribuir en el diseño de protocolos de encaminamiento en redes ad hoc vehiculares para servicios de notificaciones (p.ej. reportes del estado del tráfico) en entornos urbanos. El primer paso para alcanzar este objetivo general ha sido el estudio de componentes y herramientas para simular un escenario realista de red ad hoc vehicular. Además, se ha analizado el impacto del nivel de realismo de cada uno de los componentes de simulación en los resultados obtenidos. Así también, se ha propuesto un mecanismo de resolución de direcciones automático y coherente para redes VANET a través del uso de los propios mensajes de señalización de los protocolos de encaminamiento. Esta mejora simplifica la operación de una red ad hoc vehicular y como consecuencia aumenta la tasa de recepción de paquetes. A continuación, se ha abordado el problema de la aparición inesperada de paquetes de datos duplicados en una comunicación punto a punto. Para ello, se ha propuesto el filtrado de paquetes duplicados a nivel del protocolo de encaminamiento. Esto ha producido un incremento del ancho disponible en el canal y una reducción del retardo medio en la trasmisión de un paquete, a costa de un mínimo aumento de la pérdida de paquetes. Por otra parte, hemos propuesto un protocolo de encaminamiento multi-métrica MMMR (Multi-Metric Map-aware Routing protocol), el cual incorpora cuatro métricas (distancia al destino, trayectoria, densidad de vehículos y ancho de banda) en las decisiones de encaminamiento. Con el objetivo de aumentar la tasa de entrega de paquetes en MMMR, hemos desarrollado un algoritmo heurístico de encaminamiento geográfico denominado GHR (Geographical Heuristic Routing). Esta propuesta integra las técnicas de optimización Tabu y Simulated Annealing, que permiten a GHR adaptarse a las características específicas del escenario. Adicionalmente, hemos propuesto 2hGAR (2-hops Geographical Anycast Routing), un protocolo de encaminamiento anycast que emplea información de la topología de red a dos saltos de distancia para tomar la decisión de encaminamiento de los mensajes. Los resultados muestran que la aleatoriedad controlada de GHR en su operación mejora el rendimiento de MMMR. Asimismo, 2hGAR presenta retardos de paquete menores a los obtenidos por GHR y una mayor tasa de paquetes entregados, especialmente en escenarios con alta densidad de vehículos. Finalmente, se han propuesto dos modelos de optimización mixtos (enteros y lineales) para detectar los mejores lugares de la ciudad donde ubicar los puntos de acceso de la red, los cuales se encargan de recolectar los reportes generados por los vehículos.Postprint (published version

A Framework for Performance Evaluation of VANETs Using NS-3 Simulator

During the last decade, the number of vehicles on roads has been rapidly growing. Therefore, the demands for communication on the move are also increasing and the attention from many researchers is focused on the Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) because of their importance for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs). Due to the complexity and cost of practical evaluation of VANETs, the researchers often rely on network simulation in order to evaluate their work. In this paper, we have developed a Network Simulator 3 (NS-3) based framework for VANETs that provides network performance analysis based on the key performance indicators such as throughput, packet loss ratio, overhead, end-to-end delay, jitter, etc. Since VANETs are highly dynamic networks, many researchers have proposed different routing protocols in order to improve the network performance. In this paper we have compared several topology-based routing protocols, and proposed utilization of the commonly used Expected Transmission Count (ETX) metric to improve VANET performance.</p

Performance Evaluation of Routing Protocols for Vehicle Re-Routing in ITS-based Vehicular Networks

This study aims to assess the performance of routing protocols in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS)-based vehicular networks, specifically in accident and highway scenarios. The effective management of traffic flow in these situations is crucial for ensuring the safety and smooth operation of vehicular networks. Therefore, it is imperative to evaluate routing protocols to identify the most suitable one for these scenarios. The evaluation considers various commonly used routing protocols in vehicular networks, including Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Ad hoc On-Demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV), and Destination-Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV). The evaluation is based on several performance metrics, such as packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, network throughput, normalized routing load, and routing overhead. These metrics provide insights into the effectiveness and efficiency of the routing protocols in handling re-routing in accident and highway scenarios. The research is divided into two modules, Module I and Module II, to evaluate the effectiveness of routing protocols in these distinct scenarios using the NS2 simulation tool. The simulation results are analyzed and compared to determine the performance of the routing protocols in each module. The findings indicate that AODV consistently achieves the highest throughput, packet delivery ratio, and lowest end-to-end delay, routing overhead, and normalized routing load, followed by AOMDV and then DSDV. The findings of this study contribute to the understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different routing protocols in accident and highway scenarios. This knowledge can assist in the development of more efficient and reliable routing protocols for vehicular networks

DESIGN OF EFFICIENT IN-NETWORK DATA PROCESSING AND DISSEMINATION FOR VANETS

By providing vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure wireless communications, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), also known as the “networks on wheels”, can greatly enhance traffic safety, traffic efficiency and driving experience for intelligent transportation system (ITS). However, the unique features of VANETs, such as high mobility and uneven distribution of vehicular nodes, impose critical challenges of high efficiency and reliability for the implementation of VANETs. This dissertation is motivated by the great application potentials of VANETs in the design of efficient in-network data processing and dissemination. Considering the significance of message aggregation, data dissemination and data collection, this dissertation research targets at enhancing the traffic safety and traffic efficiency, as well as developing novel commercial applications, based on VANETs, following four aspects: 1) accurate and efficient message aggregation to detect on-road safety relevant events, 2) reliable data dissemination to reliably notify remote vehicles, 3) efficient and reliable spatial data collection from vehicular sensors, and 4) novel promising applications to exploit the commercial potentials of VANETs. Specifically, to enable cooperative detection of safety relevant events on the roads, the structure-less message aggregation (SLMA) scheme is proposed to improve communication efficiency and message accuracy. The scheme of relative position based message dissemination (RPB-MD) is proposed to reliably and efficiently disseminate messages to all intended vehicles in the zone-of-relevance in varying traffic density. Due to numerous vehicular sensor data available based on VANETs, the scheme of compressive sampling based data collection (CS-DC) is proposed to efficiently collect the spatial relevance data in a large scale, especially in the dense traffic. In addition, with novel and efficient solutions proposed for the application specific issues of data dissemination and data collection, several appealing value-added applications for VANETs are developed to exploit the commercial potentials of VANETs, namely general purpose automatic survey (GPAS), VANET-based ambient ad dissemination (VAAD) and VANET based vehicle performance monitoring and analysis (VehicleView). Thus, by improving the efficiency and reliability in in-network data processing and dissemination, including message aggregation, data dissemination and data collection, together with the development of novel promising applications, this dissertation will help push VANETs further to the stage of massive deployment

Quality of service aware data dissemination in vehicular Ad Hoc networks

Des systèmes de transport intelligents (STI) seront éventuellement fournis dans un proche avenir pour la sécurité et le confort des personnes lors de leurs déplacements sur les routes. Les réseaux ad-hoc véhiculaires (VANETs) représentent l'élément clé des STI. Les VANETs sont formés par des véhicules qui communiquent entre eux et avec l'infrastructure. En effet, les véhicules pourront échanger des messages qui comprennent, par exemple, des informations sur la circulation routière, les situations d'urgence et les divertissements. En particulier, les messages d'urgence sont diffusés par des véhicules en cas d'urgence (p.ex. un accident de voiture); afin de permettre aux conducteurs de réagir à temps (p.ex., ralentir), les messages d'urgence doivent être diffusés de manière fiable dans un délai très court. Dans les VANETs, il existe plusieurs facteurs, tels que le canal à pertes, les terminaux cachés, les interférences et la bande passante limitée, qui compliquent énormément la satisfaction des exigences de fiabilité et de délai des messages d'urgence. Dans cette thèse, en guise de première contribution, nous proposons un schéma de diffusion efficace à plusieurs sauts, appelé Dynamic Partitioning Scheme (DPS), pour diffuser les messages d'urgence. DPS calcule les tailles de partitions dynamiques et le calendrier de transmission pour chaque partition; à l'intérieur de la zone arrière de l'expéditeur, les partitions sont calculées de sorte qu'en moyenne chaque partition contient au moins un seul véhicule; l'objectif est de s'assurer que seul un véhicule dans la partition la plus éloignée (de l'expéditeur) est utilisé pour diffuser le message, jusqu'au saut suivant; ceci donne lieu à un délai d'un saut plus court. DPS assure une diffusion rapide des messages d'urgence. En outre, un nouveau mécanisme d'établissement de liaison, qui utilise des tonalités occupées, est proposé pour résoudre le problème du problème de terminal caché. Dans les VANETs, la Multidiffusion, c'est-à-dire la transmission d'un message d'une source à un nombre limité de véhicules connus en tant que destinations, est très importante. Par rapport à la diffusion unique, avec Multidiffusion, la source peut simultanément prendre en charge plusieurs destinations, via une arborescence de multidiffusion, ce qui permet d'économiser de la bande passante et de réduire la congestion du réseau. Cependant, puisque les VANETs ont une topologie dynamique, le maintien de la connectivité de l'arbre de multidiffusion est un problème majeur. Comme deuxième contribution, nous proposons deux approches pour modéliser l'utilisation totale de bande passante d'une arborescence de multidiffusion: (i) la première approche considère le nombre de segments de route impliqués dans l'arbre de multidiffusion et (ii) la seconde approche considère le nombre d'intersections relais dans l'arbre de multidiffusion. Une heuristique est proposée pour chaque approche. Pour assurer la qualité de service de l'arbre de multidiffusion, des procédures efficaces sont proposées pour le suivi des destinations et la surveillance de la qualité de service des segments de route. Comme troisième contribution, nous étudions le problème de la congestion causée par le routage du trafic de données dans les VANETs. Nous proposons (1) une approche de routage basée sur l’infonuagique qui, contrairement aux approches existantes, prend en compte les chemins de routage existants qui relaient déjà les données dans les VANETs. Les nouvelles demandes de routage sont traitées de sorte qu'aucun segment de route ne soit surchargé par plusieurs chemins de routage croisés. Au lieu d'acheminer les données en utilisant des chemins de routage sur un nombre limité de segments de route, notre approche équilibre la charge des données en utilisant des chemins de routage sur l'ensemble des tronçons routiers urbains, dans le but d'empêcher, dans la mesure du possible, les congestions locales dans les VANETs; et (2) une approche basée sur le réseau défini par logiciel (SDN) pour surveiller la connectivité VANET en temps réel et les délais de transmission sur chaque segment de route. Les données de surveillance sont utilisées en entrée de l'approche de routage.Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) will be eventually provided in the near future for both safety and comfort of people during their travel on the roads. Vehicular ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), represent the key component of ITS. VANETs consist of vehicles that communicate with each other and with the infrastructure. Indeed, vehicles will be able to exchange messages that include, for example, information about road traffic, emergency situations, and entertainment. Particularly, emergency messages are broadcasted by vehicles in case of an emergency (e.g., car accident); in order to allow drivers to react in time (e.g., slow down), emergency messages must be reliably disseminated with very short delay. In VANETs, there are several factors, such as lossy channel, hidden terminals, interferences and scarce bandwidth, which make satisfying reliability and delay requirements of emergency messages very challenging. In this thesis, as the first contribution, we propose a reliable time-efficient and multi-hop broadcasting scheme, called Dynamic Partitioning Scheme (DPS), to disseminate emergency messages. DPS computes dynamic partition sizes and the transmission schedule for each partition; inside the back area of the sender, the partitions are computed such that in average each partition contains at least a single vehicle; the objective is to ensure that only a vehicle in the farthest partition (from the sender) is used to disseminate the message, to next hop, resulting in shorter one hop delay. DPS ensures fast dissemination of emergency messages. Moreover, a new handshaking mechanism, that uses busy tones, is proposed to solve the problem of hidden terminal problem. In VANETs, Multicasting, i.e. delivering a message from a source to a limited known number of vehicles as destinations, is very important. Compared to Unicasting, with Multicasting, the source can simultaneously support multiple destinations, via a multicast tree, saving bandwidth and reducing overall communication congestion. However, since VANETs have a dynamic topology, maintaining the connectivity of the multicast tree is a major issue. As the second contribution, we propose two approaches to model total bandwidth usage of a multicast tree: (i) the first approach considers the number of road segments involved in the multicast tree and (ii) the second approach considers the number of relaying intersections involved in the multicast tree. A heuristic is proposed for each approach. To ensure QoS of the multicasting tree, efficient procedures are proposed for tracking destinations and monitoring QoS of road segments. As the third contribution, we study the problem of network congestion in routing data traffic in VANETs. We propose (1) a Cloud-based routing approach that, in opposition to existing approaches, takes into account existing routing paths which are already relaying data in VANETs. New routing requests are processed such that no road segment gets overloaded by multiple crossing routing paths. Instead of routing over a limited set of road segments, our approach balances the load of communication paths over the whole urban road segments, with the objective to prevent, whenever possible, local congestions in VANETs; and (2) a Software Defined Networking (SDN) based approach to monitor real-time VANETs connectivity and transmission delays on each road segment. The monitoring data is used as input to the routing approach

A Survey on the Application of Evolutionary Algorithms for Mobile Multihop Ad Hoc Network Optimization Problems

Evolutionary algorithms are metaheuristic algorithms that provide quasioptimal solutions in a reasonable time. They have been applied to many optimization problems in a high number of scientific areas. In this survey paper, we focus on the application of evolutionary algorithms to solve optimization problems related to a type of complex network likemobilemultihop ad hoc networks. Since its origin, mobile multihop ad hoc network has evolved causing new types of multihop networks to appear such as vehicular ad hoc networks and delay tolerant networks, leading to the solution of new issues and optimization problems. In this survey, we review the main work presented for each type of mobile multihop ad hoc network and we also present some innovative ideas and open challenges to guide further research in this topic