A Taxonomy for Congestion Control Algorithms in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

One of the main criteria in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) that has attracted the researchers' consideration is congestion control. Accordingly, many algorithms have been proposed to alleviate the congestion problem, although it is hard to find an appropriate algorithm for applications and safety messages among them. Safety messages encompass beacons and event-driven messages. Delay and reliability are essential requirements for event-driven messages. In crowded networks where beacon messages are broadcasted at a high number of frequencies by many vehicles, the Control Channel (CCH), which used for beacons sending, will be easily congested. On the other hand, to guarantee the reliability and timely delivery of event-driven messages, having a congestion free control channel is a necessity. Thus, consideration of this study is given to find a solution for the congestion problem in VANETs by taking a comprehensive look at the existent congestion control algorithms. In addition, the taxonomy for congestion control algorithms in VANETs is presented based on three classes, namely, proactive, reactive and hybrid. Finally, we have found the criteria in which fulfill prerequisite of a good congestion control algorithm

SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks

The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework, communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services, providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner. According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologie

V2X Content Distribution Based on Batched Network Coding with Distributed Scheduling

Content distribution is an application in intelligent transportation system to assist vehicles in acquiring information such as digital maps and entertainment materials. In this paper, we consider content distribution from a single roadside infrastructure unit to a group of vehicles passing by it. To combat the short connection time and the lossy channel quality, the downloaded contents need to be further shared among vehicles after the initial broadcasting phase. To this end, we propose a joint infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication scheme based on batched sparse (BATS) coding to minimize the traffic overhead and reduce the total transmission delay. In the I2V phase, the roadside unit (RSU) encodes the original large-size file into a number of batches in a rateless manner, each containing a fixed number of coded packets, and sequentially broadcasts them during the I2V connection time. In the V2V phase, vehicles perform the network coded cooperative sharing by re-encoding the received packets. We propose a utility-based distributed algorithm to efficiently schedule the V2V cooperative transmissions, hence reducing the transmission delay. A closed-form expression for the expected rank distribution of the proposed content distribution scheme is derived, which is used to design the optimal BATS code. The performance of the proposed content distribution scheme is evaluated by extensive simulations that consider multi-lane road and realistic vehicular traffic settings, and shown to significantly outperform the existing content distribution protocols.Comment: 12 pages and 9 figure