Vehicular Networks and Outdoor Pedestrian Localization

This thesis focuses on vehicular networks and outdoor pedestrian localization. In particular, it targets secure positioning in vehicular networks and pedestrian localization for safety services in outdoor environments. The former research topic must cope with three major challenges, concerning users’ privacy, computational costs of security and the system trust on user correctness. This thesis addresses those issues by proposing a new lightweight privacy-preserving framework for continuous tracking of vehicles. The proposed solution is evaluated in both dense and sparse vehicular settings through simulation and experiments in real-world testbeds. In addition, this thesis explores the benefit given by the use of low frequency bands for the transmission of control messages in vehicular networks. The latter topic is motivated by a significant number of traffic accidents with pedestrians distracted by their smartphones. This thesis proposes two different localization solutions specifically for pedestrian safety: a GPS-based approach and a shoe-mounted inertial sensor method. The GPS-based solution is more suitable for rural and suburban areas while it is not applicable in dense urban environments, due to large positioning errors. Instead the inertial sensor approach overcomes the limitations of previous technique in urban environments. Indeed, by exploiting accelerometer data, this architecture is able to precisely detect the transitions from safe to potentially unsafe walking locations without the need of any absolute positioning systems

Modeling and Simulation of Vehicle to Vehicle and Infrastructure Communication in Realistic Large Scale Urban Area

During the last decades, Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) has progressed at a rapid rate, which aim to improve transportation activities in terms of safety and efficiency. Car to Car or Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications and Car/Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (I2V or V2I) communications are important components of the ITS architecture. Communication between cars is often referred to Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANET) and it has many advantages such as: reducing cars accidents, minimizing the traffic jam, reducing fuel consumption and emissions and etc. VANET architectures have been standardized in the IEEE-802.11p specification. For a closer look on V2V and V2I studies, the necessity of simulations is obvious. Network simulators can simulate the ad-hoc network but they cannot simulate the huge traffic of cities. In order to solve this problem, this thesis studies the Veins framework which is used to run a traffic (SUMO) and a network (OMNET++) simulator in parallel and simulates the realistic traffics of the city of Cologne, Germany, as an ad-hoc network. Several different simulations and performance analyses have been done to investigate the ability of different VANET applications. In the simulations, cars move in the real map of the city of Cologne and communicate with each other and also with RoadSideUnits with using IEEE 802.11p standard. Then, Probability of Beacons Delivery (PBD) in different area of a real city are calculated and also are compared with the analytical model. This study is the first research performed on calculating PBD of IEEE 802.11p in realistic large urban area. Then, the thesis focuses on modelling and analysis of the applications of the V2I in real city. In these sections, two different simulations of application of the VANET are done by developing the Veins framework and also by developing two new programs written in Python which are connected to SUMO and control the real traffic simulation. One program simulates a real city with intelligent traffic lights for decreasing response time of emergency vehicles by using V2I. The results show that using V2I communication based on 802.11p between emergency cars and traffic lights can decrease the response time of emergency cars up to 70%. Another program, simulates dynamic route planning in real traffic simulation which is used V2I and V2V communication. The result of this simulation show the capability of V2V and V2I to decrease the traveling time, fuel consumptions and emissions of the cars in the city

Integrated Architecture for Configuration and Service Management in MANET Environments

Esta tesis nos ha permitido trasladar algunos conceptos teóricos de la computación ubicua a escenarios reales, identificando las necesidades específicas de diferentes tipos de aplicaciones. Con el fin de alcanzar este objetivo, proponemos dos prototipos que proporcionan servicios sensibles al contexto en diferentes entornos, tales como conferencias o salas de recuperación en hospitales. Estos prototipos experimentales explotan la tecnología Bluetooth para ofrecer información basada en las preferencias del usuario. En ambos casos, hemos llevado a cabo algunos experimentos con el fin de evaluar el comportamiento de los sistemas y su rendimento. También abordamos en esta tesis el problema de la autoconfiguración de redes MANET basadas en el estándar 802.11 a través de dos soluciones novedosas. La primera es una solución centralizada que se basa en la tecnología Bluetooth, mientras la segunda es una solución distribuida que no necesita recurrir a ninguna tecnología adicional, ya que se basa en el uso del parámetro SSID. Ambos métodos se han diseñado para permitir que usuarios no expertos puedan unirse a una red MANET de forma transparente, proporcionando una configuración automática, rápida, y fiable de los terminales. Los resultados experimentales en implementaciones reales nos han permitido evaluar el rendimiento de las soluciones propuestas y demostrar que las estaciones cercanas se pueden configurar en pocos segundos. Además, hemos comparado ambas soluciones entre sí para poner de manifiesto las diferentes ventajas y desventajas en cuanto a rendimento. La principal contribución de esta tesis es EasyMANET, una plataforma ampliable y configurable cuyo objetivo es automatizar lo máximo posible las tareas que afectan a la configuración y puesta en marcha de redes MANET, de modo que su uso sea más simple y accesible.Cano Reyes, J. (2012). Integrated Architecture for Configuration and Service Management in MANET Environments [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/14675Palanci

A RELIABILITY-BASED ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR VEHICULAR AD-HOC NETWORKS

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs), an emerging technology, would allow vehicles to form a self-organized network without the aid of a permanent infrastructure. As a prerequisite to communication in VANETs, an efficient route between communicating nodes in the network must be established, and the routing protocol must adapt to the rapidly changing topology of vehicles in motion. This is one of the goals of VANET routing protocols. In this thesis, we present an efficient routing protocol for VANETs, called the Reliable Inter-VEhicular Routing (RIVER) protocol. RIVER utilizes an undirected graph that represents the surrounding street layout where the vertices of the graph are points at which streets curve or intersect, and the graph edges represent the street segments between those vertices. Unlike existing protocols, RIVER performs real-time, active traffic monitoring and uses this data and other data gathered through passive mechanisms to assign a reliability rating to each street edge. The protocol then uses these reliability ratings to select the most reliable route. Control messages are used to identify a node’s neighbors, determine the reliability of street edges, and to share street edge reliability information with other nodes

AN ADAPTIVE INFORMATION DISSEMINATION MODEL FOR VANET COMMUNICATION

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have been envisioned to be useful in road safety and many commercial applications. The growing trend to provide communication among the vehicles on the road has provided the opportunities for developing a variety of applications for VANET. The unique characteristics of VANET bring about new research challenges

A Framework for Quality of Service in Vehicle-to-Pedestrian Safety Communication

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication has emerged as an important mechanism to improve the safety and efficiency of road traffic. V2X communication encompasses Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I), and Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communication. Among these types, the V2P communication efforts continue to be in the preliminary stage and lack a rounded approach towards the development of V2P systems. V2P involves communication between vehicles and a wide variety of Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs), such as pedestrians, bicyclists, mopeds, etc. The V2X systems were originally developed only for V2V and V2I when solely the vehicle characteristics were in focus. However, effective V2P system design needs to consider the characteristics of VRUs. The differing characteristics of VRUs have given rise to many questions while adapting to the V2V communication model for the V2P system. This dissertation addresses three aspects pertaining to the development of the V2P safety system. The first aspect involves a systematic design of a V2P system using a holistic approach. This dissertation proposes a V2P design framework based on various categories of inputs that are required for the design of an effective V2P system. This framework improves the understanding of the V2P system requirements and helps make the design process more systematic. The second aspect is the network performance of the V2X network in the presence of a large number of VRUs. This dissertation proposes MC-COCO4V2P, which is an energy-efficient pedestrian clustering mechanism for network congestion mitigation. MC-COCO4V2P improves network performance by reducing the pedestrian-generated safety messages. It also improves the battery life of the pedestrian devices in the process. The third aspect involves the reliability of communication between a pair of a vehicle and a pedestrian that are on the verge of collision. This dissertation classifies such crucial communication as the one requiring the highest priority even among the exchange of critical safety messages. It proposes a mechanism enabling the surrounding nodes to reduce the communication priority temporarily. This results in preferred medium access for the pair resulting in higher Quality-of-Service (QoS) for the crucial communication.Die Kommunikation zwischen Verkehrsteilnehmern (V2X) hat sich zu einem wichtigen Mechanismus zur Verbesserung der Sicherheit und Effizienz des Straßenverkehrs entwickelt. Obwohl die V2X-Kommunikation prinzipiell die Kommunikation zwischen Fahrzeugen (V2V), zwischen Fahrzeug und Infrastruktur (V2I) sowie zwischen Fahrzeug und Fußgänger (V2P) umfasst, sind Ansätze zur V2P-Kommunikation weiterhin in einem sehr frühen Stadium und lassen einen umfassenden Ansatz für die Entwicklung von V2P-Systemen vermissen. V2P umfasst im Detail die Kommunikation zwischen Fahrzeugen und einer Vielzahl von gefährdeten Verkehrsteilnehmern (VRUs), wie beispielsweise Fußgänger, Radfahrer oder Mopeds. V2X-Systeme wurden ursprünglich nur für V2V- und V2I-Kommunikation entwickelt, wobei ausschließlich die Fahrzeugeigenschaften im Fokus standen. Ein effektives V2P-Systemdesign muss jedoch auch die Eigenschaften von VRUs berücksichtigen, die bei der Berücksichtigung der V2P-Kommunikation in einem V2X-System viele Fragen aufwerfen. Diese Dissertation befasst sich mit drei Aspekten im Zusammenhang mit der Entwicklung eines V2P-Systems. Der erste Aspekt betrifft die systematische Konzeption eines V2P-Systems nach einem ganzheitlichen Ansatz. Diese Dissertation schlägt einen V2P-Entwurfsrahmen vor, der auf verschiedenen Eingangsgrößen basiert, die für die Entwicklung eines effektiven V2P-Systems erforderlich sind. Dieser Entwurfsrahmen verbessert das Verständnis der V2P-Systemanforderungen und trägt dazu bei, den Entwurfsprozess systematischer zu gestalten. Der zweite Aspekt betrifft die Leistung des V2X-Netzes, wenn eine große Anzahl von VRUs präsent ist. Diese Dissertation schlägt hierfür MC-COCO4V2P vor, einen energieeffizienten Clustering-Mechanismus für Fußgänger zur Eindämmung der Netzüberlastung. MC-COCO4V2P verbessert die Netzleistung, indem die Anzahl der von Fußgängern generierten Sicherheitsmeldungen reduziert wird. Damit wird zudem die Batterielebensdauer der von den Fußgängern genutzten Geräte verbessert. Der dritte Aspekt betrifft die Zuverlässigkeit der Kommunikation zwischen einem Fahrzeug und einem Fußgänger, die kurz vor einem Zusammenstoß stehen. Diese Dissertation stuft eine so wichtige Kommunikation als diejenige ein, die selbst beim Austausch anderer kritischer Sicherheitsnachrichten die höchste Priorität bekommt. Es wird ein Mechanismus vorgeschlagen, der es den umgebenden Verkehrsteilnehmern ermöglicht, ihre Kommunikationspriorität vorübergehend zu verringern. Dies führt zu einem bevorzugten Medienzugriff für die durch eine Kollision gefährdeten Verkehrsteilnehmer, was zu einer höheren Dienstgüte (QoS) für deren Kommunikation führt.Pedestrians and bicyclists, also known as Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs), are one of the weakest components of Intelligent Transportation Systems from a safety perspective. However, with the advent of new communication technologies, VRU protection may no longer be dependent solely on the vehicle’s safety systems. VRUs may share their location information with the surrounding vehicles to increase awareness of their presence. Such communication among vehicles and VRUs is referred to as Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communication. Although the V2P system may be built upon the existing Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication system, it has its own set of challenges, such as different VRU mobility characteristics, energy-constrained devices, and VRU density. Therefore, there needs to be a V2P system model which is adapted to the VRU characteristics. This dissertation tackles this challenge by proposing a framework that enables scalability, reliability, and energy efficiency for VRU communication

Previous hop routing: exploiting opportunism in VANETs

Routing in highly dynamic wireless networks such as Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) is a challenging task due to frequent topology changes. Sustaining a transmission path between peers in such network environment is difficult. In this thesis, Previous Hop Routing (PHR) is poposed; an opportunistic forwarding protocol exploiting previous hop information and distance to destination to make the forwarding decision on a packet-by-packet basis. It is intended for use in highly dynamic network where the life time of a hop-by-hop path between source and destination nodes is short. Exploiting the broadcast nature of wireless communication avoids the need to copy packets, and enables redundant paths to be formed. To save network resources, especially under high network loads, PHR employs probabilistic forwarding. The forwarding probability is calculated based on the perceived network load as measured by the arrival rate at the network interface. We evaluate PHR in an urban VANET environment using NS2 (for network traffic) and SUMO (for vehicular movement) simulators, with scenarios configured to re ect real-world conditions. The simulation scenarios are configured to use two velocity profiles i.e. Low and high velocity. The results show that the PHR networks able to achieve best performance as measured by Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and Drop Burst Length (DBL) compared to conventional routing protocols in high velocity scenarios

Congestion Control in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

RÉSUMÉ Les réseaux Véhiculaires ad hoc (VANets) sont conçus pour permettre des communications sans fil fiables entre les nœuds mobiles à haute vitesse. Afin d'améliorer la performance des applications dans ce type de réseaux et garantir un environnement sûr et confortable pour ses utilisateurs, la Qualité de Service (QoS) doit être supportée dans ces réseaux. Le délai ainsi que les pertes de paquets sont deux principaux indicateurs de QoS qui augmentent de manière significative en raison de la congestion dans les réseaux. En effet, la congestion du réseau entraîne une saturation des canaux ainsi qu’une augmentation des collisions de paquets dans les canaux. Par conséquent, elle doit être contrôlée pour réduire les pertes de paquets ainsi que le délai, et améliorer les performances des réseaux véhiculaires. Le contrôle de congestion dans les réseaux VANets est une tâche difficile en raison des caractéristiques spécifiques des VANets, telles que la grande mobilité des nœuds à haute vitesse, le taux élevé de changement de topologie, etc. Le contrôle de congestion dans les réseaux VANets peut être effectué en ayant recours à une stratégie qui utilise l'un des paramètres suivants : le taux de transmission, la puissance de transmission, la priorisation et l’ordonnancement, ainsi que les stratégies hybrides. Les stratégies de contrôle de congestion dans les réseaux VANets doivent faire face à quelques défis tels que l'utilisation inéquitable des ressources, la surcharge de communication, le délai de transmission élevé, et l'utilisation inefficace de la bande passante, etc. Par conséquent, il est nécessaire de développer de nouvelles approches pour faire face à ces défis et améliorer la performance des réseaux VANets. Dans cette thèse, dans un premier temps, une stratégie de contrôle de congestion en boucle fermée est développée. Cette stratégie est une méthode de contrôle de congestion dynamique et distribuée qui détecte la congestion en mesurant le niveau d'utilisation du canal. Ensuite, la congestion est contrôlée en ajustant la portée et le taux de transmission qui ont un impact considérable sur la saturation du canal. Ajuster la portée et le taux de transmission au sein des VANets est un problème NP-difficile en raison de la grande complexité de la détermination des valeurs appropriées pour ces paramètres. Considérant les avantages de la méthode de recherche Tabou et son adaptabilité au problème, une méthode de recherche multi-objective est utilisée pour trouver une portée et un taux de transmission dans un délai raisonnable. Le délai et la gigue, fonctions multi-objectifs de l'algorithme Tabou, sont minimisés dans l'algorithme proposé. Par la suite, deux stratégies de contrôle de congestion en boucle ouverte sont proposées afin de réduire la congestion dans les canaux en utilisant la priorisation et l'ordonnancement des messages. Ces stratégies définissent la priorité pour chaque message en considérant son type de contenu (par exemple les messages d'urgence, de beacon, et de service), la taille des messages, et l’état du réseau (par exemple, les métriques de la vélocité, la direction, l'utilité, la distance, et la validité). L'ordonnancement des messages est effectué sur la base des priorités définies. De plus, comme seconde technique d'ordonnancement, une méthode de recherche Tabou est employée pour planifier les files d'attente de contrôle et de service des canaux de transmission dans un délai raisonnable. A cet effet, le délai et la gigue lors de l'acheminement des messages sont minimisés. Enfin, une stratégie localisée et centralisée qui utilise les ensembles RSU fixés aux intersections pour détecter et contrôler de la congestion est proposée. Cette stratégie regroupe tous les messages transférés entre les véhicules qui se sont arrêtés à une lumière de signalisation en utilisant les algorithmes de Machine Learning. Dans cette stratégie, un algorithme de k-means est utilisé pour regrouper les messages en fonction de leurs caractéristiques (par exemple la taille des messages, la validité des messages, et le type de messages, etc.). Les paramètres de communication, y compris le portée et le taux de transmission, la taille de la fenêtre de contention, et le paramètre AIFS (Arbitration Inter-Frame Spacing) sont déterminés pour chaque grappe de messages en vue de minimiser le délai de livraison. Ensuite, les paramètres de communication déterminés sont envoyés aux véhicules par les RSUs, et les véhicules opèrent en fonction de ces paramètres pour le transfert des messages. Les performances des trois stratégies proposées ont été évaluées en simulant des scénarios dans les autoroutes et la circulation urbaine avec les simulateurs NS2 et SUMO. Des comparaisons ont aussi été faites entre les résultats obtenus à partir des stratégies proposées et les stratégies de contrôle de congestion communément utilisées. Les résultats révèlent qu’avec les stratégies de contrôle de congestion proposées, le débit du réseau augmente et le taux de perte de paquets ainsi que de délai diminuent de manière significative en comparaison aux autres stratégies. Par conséquent, l'application des méthodes proposées aide à améliorer la performance, la sureté et la fiabilité des VANets.----------ABSTRACT Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANets) are designed to provide reliable wireless communications between high-speed mobile nodes. In order to improve the performance of VANets’ applications, and make a safe and comfort environment for VANets’ users, Quality of Service (QoS) should be supported in these networks. The delay and packet losses are two main indicators of QoS that dramatically increase due to the congestion occurrence in the networks. Indeed, due to congestion occurrence, the channels are saturated and the packet collisions increase in the channels. Therefore, the congestion should be controlled to decrease the packet losses and delay, and to increase the performance of VANets. Congestion control in VANets is a challenging task due to the specific characteristics of VANets such as high mobility of the nodes with high speed, and high rate of topology changes, and so on. Congestion control in VANets can be carried out using the strategies that can be classified into rate-based, power-based, CSMA/CA-based, prioritizing and scheduling-based, and hybrid strategies. The congestion control strategies in VANets face to some challenges such as unfair resources usage, communication overhead, high transmission delay, and inefficient bandwidth utilization, and so on. Therefore, it is required to develop new strategies to cope with these challenges and improve the performance of VANets. In this dissertation, first, a closed-loop congestion control strategy is developed. This strategy is a dynamic and distributed congestion control strategy that detects the congestion by measuring the channel usage level. Then, the congestion is controlled by tuning the transmission range and rate that considerably impact on the channel saturation. Tuning the transmission range and rate in VANets is an NP-hard problem due to the high complexity of determining the proper values for these parameters in vehicular networks. Considering the benefits of Tabu search algorithm and its adaptability with the problem, a multi-objective Tabu search algorithm is used for tuning transmission range and rate in reasonable time. In the proposed algorithm, the delay and jitter are minimized as the objective functions of multi-objective Tabu Search algorithm. Second, two open-loop congestion control strategies are proposed that prevent the congestion occurrence in the channels using the prioritizing and scheduling the messages. These strategies define the priority for each message by considering the content of messages (i.e. types of the messages for example emergency, beacon, and service messages), size of messages, and state of the networks (e.g. velocity, direction, usefulness, distance and validity metrics). The scheduling of the messages is conducted based on the defined priorities. In addition, as the second scheduling technique, a Tabu Search algorithm is employed to schedule the control and service channel queues in a reasonable time. For this purpose, the delay and jitter of messages delivery are minimized. Finally, a localized and centralized strategy is proposed that uses RSUs set at intersections for detecting and controlling the congestion. These strategy clusters all the messages that transferred between the vehicles stopped before the red traffic light using Machine Learning algorithms. In this strategy, a K-means learning algorithm is used for clustering the messages based on their features (e.g. size of messages, validity of messages, and type of messages, and so on). The communication parameters including the transmission range and rate, contention window size, and Arbitration Inter-Frame Spacing (AIFS) are determined for each messages cluter based on the minimized delivery delay. Then, the determined communication parameters are sent to the vehicles by RSUs, and the vehicles operate based on these parameters for transferring the messages. The performances of three proposed strategies were evaluated by simulating the highway and urban scenarios in NS2 and SUMO simulators. Comparisons were also made between the results obtained from the proposed strategies and the common used congestion control strategies. The results reveal that using the proposed congestion control strategies, the throughput, packet loss ratio and delay are significantly improved as compared to the other strategies. Therefore, applications of the proposed strategies help improve the performance, safety, and reliability of VANets

Unicast Ad-Hoc Routing in Vehicular City Scenarios

Within Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networking (VANET), i.e., networking between radio-equipped vehicles, unicast packet forwarding can be separated into the one-dimensional highway case and the two-dimensional city case. In this report, we survey the routing methods developed in the FleetNet and Network-on-Wheels projects plus a novel combination of two wellknown methods called PBR-DV or Position-Based Routing with Distance-Vector recovery. On the quest for a city-capable candidate routing algorithm as a possible standard, we discuss the usability and performance of the protocols in city scenarios. Finally, we conclude proposing PBR-DV as a candidate protocol for small-hop-count unicast VANET scenarios