Smart mobility: opportunity or threat to innovate places and cities

The concept of the “smart mobility” has become something of a buzz phrase in the planning and transport fields in the last decade. After a fervent first phase in which information technology and digital data were considered the answer for making mobility more efficient, more attractive and for increasing the quality of travel, some disappointing has grown around this concept: the distance between the visionarypotentialthatsmartness is providingis too far from the reality of urban mobility in cities. We argue in particular that two main aspects of smart mobility should be eluded: the first refers to the merely application to technology on mobility system, what we called the techo-centric aspect; the second feature is the consumer-centric aspect of smart mobility, that consider transport users only as potential consumers of a service. Starting from this, the study critics the smart mobility approach and applications and argues on a“smarter mobility” approach, in which technologies are only oneaspects of a more complex system. With a view on the urgency of looking beyond technology and beyond consumer-oriented solutions, the study arguments the need for a cross-disciplinary and a more collaborative approach that could supports transition towards a“smarter mobility” for enhancing the quality of life and the development ofvibrant cities. The article does not intend to produce a radical critique of the smart mobility concept,denying a priori its utility. Our perspectiveisthat the smart mobility is sometimes used as an evocativeslogan lacking some fundamental connection with other central aspect of mobility planning and governance. Main research questions are: what is missing in the technology-oriented or in the consumers-oriented smart mobility approach? What are the main risks behind these approaches? To answer this questions the paper provides in Section 2 the rationale behind the paper;Section 3 provides a literature review that explores the evolution on smart mobility paradigm in the last decades analysing in details the “techno-centric”and the “consumer-centric” aspects. Section 4proposes an integrated innovative approach for smart mobility, providing examples and some innovative best practices in Belgium. Some conclusions are finally drawnin Section 5, based on the role of smart mobility to create not only virtual platforms but high quality urban places

Towards Opportunistic Data Dissemination in Mobile Phone Sensor Networks

Recently, there has been a growing interest within the research community in developing opportunistic routing protocols. Many schemes have been proposed; however, they differ greatly in assumptions and in type of network for which they are evaluated. As a result, researchers have an ambiguous understanding of how these schemes compare against each other in their specific applications. To investigate the performance of existing opportunistic routing algorithms in realistic scenarios, we propose a heterogeneous architecture including fixed infrastructure, mobile infrastructure, and mobile nodes. The proposed architecture focuses on how to utilize the available, low cost short-range radios of mobile phones for data gathering and dissemination. We also propose a new realistic mobility model and metrics. Existing opportunistic routing protocols are simulated and evaluated with the proposed heterogeneous architecture, mobility models, and transmission interfaces. Results show that some protocols suffer long time-to-live (TTL), while others suffer short TTL. We show that heterogeneous sensor network architectures need heterogeneous routing algorithms, such as a combination of Epidemic and Spray and Wait

Internal report cluster 1: Urban freight innovations and solutions for sustainable deliveries (1/4)

Technical report about sustainable urban freight solutions, part 1 of

Stable Infrastructure-based Routing for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) have been instrumental in reshaping transportation towards safer roads, seamless logistics, and digital business-oriented services under the umbrella of smart city platforms. Undoubtedly, ITS applications will demand stable routing protocols that not only focus on Inter-Vehicle Communications but also on providing a fast, reliable and secure interface to the infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a novel stable infrastructure- based routing protocol for urban VANETs. It enables vehicles proactively to maintain fresh routes towards Road-Side Units (RSUs) while reactively discovering routes to nearby vehicles. It builds routes from highly stable connected intersections using a selection policy which uses a new intersection stability metric. Simulation experiments performed with accurate mobility and propagation models have confirmed the efficiency of the new protocol and its adaptability to continuously changing network status in the urban environment

iTETRIS: An Integrated Wireless and Traffic Platform for Real-Time Road Traffic Management Solutions

Wireless vehicular cooperative systems have been identified as an attractive solution to improve road traffic management, thereby contributing to the European goal of safer, cleaner, and more efficient and sustainable traffic solutions. V2V-V2I communication technologies can improve traffic management through real-time exchange of data among vehicles and with road infrastructure. It is also of great importance to investigate the adequate combination of V2V and V2I technologies to ensure the continuous and costefficient operation of traffic management solutions based on wireless vehicular cooperative solutions. However, to adequately design and optimize these communication protocols and analyze the potential of wireless vehicular cooperative systems to improve road traffic management, adequate testbeds and field operational tests need to be conducted. Despite the potential of Field Operational Tests to get the first insights into the benefits and problems faced in the development of wireless vehicular cooperative systems, there is yet the need to evaluate in the long term and large dimension the true potential benefits of wireless vehicular cooperative systems to improve traffic efficiency. To this aim, iTETRIS is devoted to the development of advanced tools coupling traffic and wireless communication simulators

Connectivity Analysis in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network based on VDTN

In the last decade, user demand has been increasing exponentially based on modern communication systems. One of these new technologies is known as mobile ad-hoc networking (MANET). One part of MANET is called a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET). It has different types such as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicular delay-tolerant networks, and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I). To provide sufficient quality of communication service in the Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Network (VDTN), it is important to present a comprehensive survey that shows the challenges and limitations of VANET. In this paper, we focus on one type of VANET, which is known as VDTNs. To investigate realistic communication systems based on VANET, we considered intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) and the possibility of replacing the roadside unit with VDTN. Many factors can affect the message propagation delay. When road-side units (RSUs) are present, which leads to an increase in the message delivery efficiency since RSUs can collaborate with vehicles on the road to increase the throughput of the network, we propose new methods based on environment and vehicle traffic and present a comprehensive evaluation of the newly suggested VDTN routing method. Furthermore, challenges and prospects are presented to stimulate interest in the scientific community

An overview of VANET vehicular networks

Today, with the development of intercity and metropolitan roadways and with various cars moving in various directions, there is a greater need than ever for a network to coordinate commutes. Nowadays, people spend a lot of time in their vehicles. Smart automobiles have developed to make that time safer, more effective, more fun, pollution-free, and affordable. However, maintaining the optimum use of resources and addressing rising needs continues to be a challenge given the popularity of vehicle users and the growing diversity of requests for various services. As a result, VANET will require modernized working practices in the future. Modern intelligent transportation management and driver assistance systems are created using cutting-edge communication technology. Vehicular Ad-hoc networks promise to increase transportation effectiveness, accident prevention, and pedestrian comfort by allowing automobiles and road infrastructure to communicate entertainment and traffic information. By constructing thorough frameworks, workflow patterns, and update procedures, including block-chain, artificial intelligence, and SDN (Software Defined Networking), this paper addresses VANET-related technologies, future advances, and related challenges. An overview of the VANET upgrade solution is given in this document in order to handle potential future problems

Vehicle to vehicle (V2V) wireless communications

This work focuses on the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, its current challenges, future perspective and possible improvement.V2V communication is characterized by the dynamic environment, high mobility, nonpredective scenario, propagation effects, and also communicating antenna's positions. This peculiarity of V2V wireless communication makes channel modelling and the vehicular propagation quite challenging. In this work, firstly we studied the present context of V2V communication also known as Vehicular Ad-hoc Netwok (VANET) including ongoing researches and studies particularly related to Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), specifically designed for automotive uses with corresponding set of protocols and standards. Secondly, we focused on communication models and improvement of these models to make them more suitable, reliable and efficient for the V2V environment. As specifies the standard, OFDM is used in V2V communication, Adaptable OFDM transceiver was designed. Some parameters as performance analytics are used to compare the improvement with the actual situation. For the enhancement of physical layer of V2V communication, this work is focused in the study of MIMO channel instead of SISO. In the designed transceiver both SISO and MIMO were implemented and studied successfully