Exploring the interoperability of public transport systems for sustainable mobility in developing cities : lessons from Johannesburg Metropolitan City, South Africa

Abstract: There have been growing concerns with regards to the state public transportation systems, particularly in the cities of developing countries. Chief among these concerns has been the lack of well-coordinated, efficient, and reliable transportation systems. The city of Johannesburg, just like any other fast-growing municipality in developing and emerging economies, has not been spared with regards to incessant public transport challenges. Consequently, there have been collective efforts from both public and private stakeholders to invest immensely in both innovative rail and road transport systems in the past decade. This article sought to achieve twin objectives. First, the work identified the state of connectivity between the rapid rail transportation and rapid bus transit systems based on Geoweb 2.0 data. Second, the work visualized the level of connectivity between these two modes to develop and formulate policy frameworks in integrating public transit systems in cities of the developing world, learning from the metropolitan city of Johannesburg. A mixed-method approach consisting of spatial and quantitative aspects was used to examine the state of connectedness and the promotion of access and mobility between the two modes. The local Moran’s I index was used to compute node clusters within the public transport system. Results from the analysis demonstrated that both high-clusters and low-clusters exist in the public transportation network, which have a high degree of centrality. It was revealed that commuters navigate from these nodes/stops with relative ease due to the short walking radius. However, the work revealed that most rail networks and bus routes, as well as the stations and bus stops, are not connected and are not significant in the local Moran’s I index, thus, making it difficult for commuters to conveniently move from the Gautrain to the Rea Vaya bus. There are, therefore, gaps with regards to the sharing of infrastructure between the two public transport modes and systems

Improving routing performance of multipath ad hoc on-demand distance vector in mobile add hoc networks.

The aim of this research is to improve routing fault tolerance in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) by optimising mUltipath routing in a well-studied reactive and single path routing protocol known as Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV). The research also aims to prove the effect of varying waiting time of Route Reply (RREP) procedure and utilising the concept of efficient routes on the performance of multipath extensions to AODV. Two novel multipath routing approaches are developed in this thesis as new extensions to AODV to optimise routing overhead by improving Route Discovery Process (RDP) and Route Maintenance Process (RMP) of multipath AODV. The first approach is a Iinkdisjoint multipath extension called 'Thresho)d efficient Routes in multipath AODV' (TRAODV) that optimises routing packets ~verhead by improving the RDP of AODV which is achieved by detecting the waiting time required for RREP procedure to receive a threshold number of efficient routes. The second approach is also a link-disjoint mUltipath extension called 'On-demand Route maintenance in Multipath AoDv' (ORMAD) which is an extension to TRAODV that optimises routing packets and delay overhead by improving the RMP of TRAODV. ORMAD applies the concepts of threshold waiting time and efficient routes to both phases RDP and RMP. It also applies RMP only to efficient routes which are selected in the RDP and when a route fails, it invokes a local repair procedure between upstream and downstream nodes of the broken link. This mechanism produces a set of alternative subroutes with less number of hops which enhances route efficiency and consequently minimises the routing overhead. TRAODV and ORMAD are implemented and evaluated against two existing multipath extensions to,AODV protocol and two traditional multipath protocols. The existing extensions to AODV used in the evaluation are a well-known protocol called Ad hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV) and a recent extension called Multiple Route AODV (MRAODV) protocol which is extended in this thesis to the new approach TRAODV while the traditional multipath protocols used in the evaluation are Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm (TORA). Protocols are implemented using NS2 and evaluated under the same simulation environment in terms of four performance metrics; packet delivery fraction, average end-to-end delay, routing packets overhead, and throughput. Simulation results of TRAODV evaluation show that the average number of routes stored in a routing table of MRAODV protocol is always larger than the average number of routes in TRAODV. Simulation results show that TRAODV reduces the overall routing packets overhead compared to both extensions AOMDV and MRAODV, especially for large network size and high mobility. A vital drawback of TRAODV is that its performance is reduced compared to AOMDV and MRAODV in terms of average end-to-end delay. Additionally, TORA still outperforms TRAODV and the other extensions to AODV in terms of routing packets overhead. In order to overcome the drawbacks of TRAODV, ORMAD is developed by improving the RDP of TRAODV. The performance of ORMAD is evaluated against RREP waiting time using the idea of utilising the efficient routes in both phases RDP and RMP. Simulation results of ORMAD show that the performance is affected by varying the two RREP waiting times of both RDP and RMP in different scenarios. As shown by the simulation results, applying the short and long waiting times in both phases tends to less performance in terms of routing packets overhead while applying the moderate waiting times tends to better performance. ORMAD enhances routing packets overhead and the average end-to-end delay compared to TRAODV, especially in high mobility scenarios. ORMAD has the closest performance to TORA protocol in terms of routing packets overhead compared to ~M~a~M~OW . Relevant concepts are formalised for ORMAD approach and conducted as an analytical model in this thesis involving the\vhole process of multipath routing in AODV extensions. ORMAD analytical model describes how the two phases RDP and RMP interact with each other with regard to two performance metrics; total number of detected routes and Route Efficiency.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Delay tolerant networking in a shopping mall environment

The increasing popularity of computing devices with short-range wireless offers new communication service opportunities. These devices are small and may be mobile or embedded in almost any type of object imaginable, including cars, tools, appliances, clothing and various consumer goods. The majority of them can store data and transmit it when a wireless, or wired, transmitting medium is available. The mobility of the individuals carrying such short-range wireless devices is important because varying distances creates connection opportunities and disconnections. It is likely that successful forwarding algorithms will be based, at least in part, on the patterns of mobility that are seen in real settings. For this reason, studying human mobility in different environments for extended periods of time is essential. Thus we need to use measurements from realistic settings to drive the development and evaluation of appropriate forwarding algorithms. Recently, several significant efforts have been made to collect data reflecting human mobility. However, these traces are from specific scenarios and their validity is difficult to generalize. In this thesis we contribute to this effort by studying human mobility in shopping malls. We ran a field trial to collect real-world Bluetooth contact data from shop employees and clerks in a shopping mall over six days. This data will allow the informed design of forwarding policies and algorithms for such settings and scenarios, and determine the effects of users' mobility patterns on the prevalence of networking opportunities. Using this data set we have analysed human mobility and interaction patterns in this shopping mall environment. We present evidence of distinct classes of mobility in this situation and characterize them in terms of power law coefficients which approximate inter-contact time distributions. These results are quite different from previous studies in other environments. We have developed a software tool which implements a mobility model for "structured" scenarios such as shopping malls, trade fairs, music festivals, stadiums and museums. In this thesis we define as structured environment, a scenario having definite and highly organised structure, where people are organised by characteristic patterns of relationship and mobility. We analysed the contact traces collected on the field to guide the design of this mobility model. We show that our synthetic mobility model produces inter-contact time and contact duration distributions which approximate well to those of the real traces. Our scenario generator also implements several random mobility models. We compared our Shopping Mall mobility model to three other random mobility models by comparing the performances of two benchmark delay tolerant routing protocols, Epidemic and Prophet, when simulated with movement traces from each model. Thus, we demonstrate that the choice of a mobility model is a significant consideration when designing and evaluating delay-tolerant mobile ad-hoc network protocols. Finally, we have also conducted an initial study to evaluate the effect of delivering messages in shopping mall environments by exclusively forwarding them to customers or sellers, each of which has distinctive mobility patterns

Delay tolerant networking in a shopping mall environment

The increasing popularity of computing devices with short-range wireless offers new communication service opportunities. These devices are small and may be mobile or embedded in almost any type of object imaginable, including cars, tools, appliances, clothing and various consumer goods. The majority of them can store data and transmit it when a wireless, or wired, transmitting medium is available. The mobility of the individuals carrying such short-range wireless devices is important because varying distances creates connection opportunities and disconnections. It is likely that successful forwarding algorithms will be based, at least in part, on the patterns of mobility that are seen in real settings. For this reason, studying human mobility in different environments for extended periods of time is essential. Thus we need to use measurements from realistic settings to drive the development and evaluation of appropriate forwarding algorithms. Recently, several significant efforts have been made to collect data reflecting human mobility. However, these traces are from specific scenarios and their validity is difficult to generalize. In this thesis we contribute to this effort by studying human mobility in shopping malls. We ran a field trial to collect real-world Bluetooth contact data from shop employees and clerks in a shopping mall over six days. This data will allow the informed design of forwarding policies and algorithms for such settings and scenarios, and determine the effects of users' mobility patterns on the prevalence of networking opportunities. Using this data set we have analysed human mobility and interaction patterns in this shopping mall environment. We present evidence of distinct classes of mobility in this situation and characterize them in terms of power law coefficients which approximate inter-contact time distributions. These results are quite different from previous studies in other environments. We have developed a software tool which implements a mobility model for "structured" scenarios such as shopping malls, trade fairs, music festivals, stadiums and museums. In this thesis we define as structured environment, a scenario having definite and highly organised structure, where people are organised by characteristic patterns of relationship and mobility. We analysed the contact traces collected on the field to guide the design of this mobility model. We show that our synthetic mobility model produces inter-contact time and contact duration distributions which approximate well to those of the real traces. Our scenario generator also implements several random mobility models. We compared our Shopping Mall mobility model to three other random mobility models by comparing the performances of two benchmark delay tolerant routing protocols, Epidemic and Prophet, when simulated with movement traces from each model. Thus, we demonstrate that the choice of a mobility model is a significant consideration when designing and evaluating delay-tolerant mobile ad-hoc network protocols. Finally, we have also conducted an initial study to evaluate the effect of delivering messages in shopping mall environments by exclusively forwarding them to customers or sellers, each of which has distinctive mobility patterns