An Assessment on the Use of Stationary Vehicles as a Support to Cooperative Positioning

In this paper, we consider the use of stationary vehicles as tools to enhance the localisation capabilities of moving vehicles in a VANET. We examine the idea in terms of its potential benefits, technical requirements, algorithmic design and experimental evaluation. Simulation results are given to illustrate the efficacy of the technique.Comment: This version of the paper is an updated version of the initial submission, where some initial comments of reviewers have been taken into accoun

A Framework for Integrating Transportation Into Smart Cities

In recent years, economic, environmental, and political forces have quickly given rise to “Smart Cities” -- an array of strategies that can transform transportation in cities. Using a multi-method approach to research and develop a framework for smart cities, this study provides a framework that can be employed to: Understand what a smart city is and how to replicate smart city successes; The role of pilot projects, metrics, and evaluations to test, implement, and replicate strategies; and Understand the role of shared micromobility, big data, and other key issues impacting communities. This research provides recommendations for policy and professional practice as it relates to integrating transportation into smart cities

A Novel Design for Advanced 5G Deployment Environments with Virtualized Resources at Vehicular and MEC Nodes

IoT and edge computing are profoundly changing the information era, bringing a hyper-connected and context-aware computing environment to reality. Connected vehicles are a critical outcome of this synergy, allowing for the seamless interconnection of autonomous mobile/fixed objects, giving rise to a decentralized vehicle-to-everything (V2X) paradigm. On this front, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) proposed the Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) standard, addressing the execution of cloud-like services at the very edge of the infrastructure, thus facilitating the support of low-latency services at the far-edge. In this article, we go a step further and propose a novel ETSI MEC-compliant architecture that fully exploits the synergies between the edge and far-edge, extending the pool of virtualized resources available at MEC nodes with vehicular ones found in the vicinity. In particular, our approach allows vehicle entities to access and partake in a negotiation process embodying a rewarding scheme, while addressing resource volatility as vehicles join and leave the resource pool. To demonstrate the viability and flexibility of our proposed approach, we have built an ETSI MEC-compliant simulation model, which could be tailored to distribute application requests based on the availability of both local and remote resources, managing their transparent migration and execution. In addition, the paper reports on the experimental validation of our proposal in a 5G network setting, contrasting different service delivery modes, by highlighting the potential of the dynamic exploitation of far-edge vehicular resources

Vehicle as a Service (VaaS): Leverage Vehicles to Build Service Networks and Capabilities for Smart Cities

Smart cities demand resources for rich immersive sensing, ubiquitous communications, powerful computing, large storage, and high intelligence (SCCSI) to support various kinds of applications, such as public safety, connected and autonomous driving, smart and connected health, and smart living. At the same time, it is widely recognized that vehicles such as autonomous cars, equipped with significantly powerful SCCSI capabilities, will become ubiquitous in future smart cities. By observing the convergence of these two trends, this article advocates the use of vehicles to build a cost-effective service network, called the Vehicle as a Service (VaaS) paradigm, where vehicles empowered with SCCSI capability form a web of mobile servers and communicators to provide SCCSI services in smart cities. Towards this direction, we first examine the potential use cases in smart cities and possible upgrades required for the transition from traditional vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to VaaS. Then, we will introduce the system architecture of the VaaS paradigm and discuss how it can provide SCCSI services in future smart cities, respectively. At last, we identify the open problems of this paradigm and future research directions, including architectural design, service provisioning, incentive design, and security & privacy. We expect that this paper paves the way towards developing a cost-effective and sustainable approach for building smart cities.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figure

An assessment on the use of stationary vehicles to support cooperative positioning systems

In this paper, we evaluate the ability of stationary vehicles (e.g. parked or temporary stopped cars) as tools to enhance the capabilities of existing cooperative positioning algorithms in vehicular networks. First, some real-world facts are provided to support the feasibility of our ideas. Then, we examine the idea in greater details in terms of the technical requirements and methodological analysis, and provide a comprehensive experimental evaluation using dedicated simulations. The routing of a drone through an urban scenario is presented as a non-traditional application case, where the benefits of the proposed approach are reflected in a better utilisation of the flight time

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