Enabling Low Cost Smart Road Traffic Sensing

Accurate traffic monitoring is a key aspect to develop Smart Mobility services. A road traffic monitoring system based on a network of sensors capturing together information from wireless interfaces of the devices inside the vehicles and also data about noise level is introduced here. This type of sensors obtain accurate road traffic flows and allow noise maps, that can be further analyzed to provide advanced services for mobility and pollution in the roads. Our main goal here is to develop such sensors at low cost with commodity devices, so as to boost their utilization.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Connectivity-Aware Routing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is a promising emerging technology that enables a wide range of appealing applications in road safety, traffic management, and passengers and driver comfort. The deployment of VANETs to enable vehicular Internet-based services and mobile data offloading is also envisioned to be a promising solution for the great demand of mobile Internet access. However, developing reliable and efficient routing protocols is one of the key challenges in VANETs due to the high vehicle mobility and frequent network topology changes. In this thesis, we highlight the routing challenges in VANETs with a focus on position-based routing (PBR), as a well-recognized routing paradigm in the vehicular environment. As the current PBR protocols do not support VANET users with connectivity information, our goal is to design an efficient routing protocol for VANETs that dynamically finds long life paths, with reduced delivery delay, and supports vehicles with instant information about connectivity to the infrastructure. The focus of this thesis will be on predicting vehicular mobility to estimate inter-vehicle link duration in order to support routing protocols with proactive connectivity information for a better routing performance. Via three stages to meet our goal, we propose three novel routing protocols to estimate both broad and comprehensive connectivities in VANETs: iCAR, iCAR-II, and D-CAR. iCAR supports VANET users with instant broad connectivity information to surrounding road intersections, iCAR-II uses cellular network channels for comprehensive connectivity awareness to Roadside Units (RSUs), and finally D-CAR supports users with instant comprehensive connectivity information without the assistance of other networks. Detailed analysis and simulation based evaluations of our proposed protocols demonstrate the validity of using VANETs for Internet-based services and mobile data offloading in addition to the significant improvement of VANETs performance in terms of packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay

TDMA Slot Reservation in Cluster-Based VANETs

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are a form of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) in which vehicles on the road form the nodes of the network. VANETs provide several services to enhance the safety and comfort of drivers and passengers. These services can be obtained by the wireless exchange of information among the vehicles driving on the road. In particular, the transmission of two different types of messages, safety/update and non-safety messages. The transmission of safety/update message aims to inform the nearby vehicles about the sender\u27s current status and/or a detected dangerous situation. This type of transmission is designed to help in accident and danger avoidance. Moreover, it requires high message generated rate and high reliability. On the other hand, the transmission of non-safety message aims to increase the comfort on vehicles by supporting several non-safety services, from notifications of traffic conditions to file sharing. Unfortunately, the transmission of non-safety message has less priority than safety messages, which may cause shutting down the comfort services. The goal of this dissertation is to design a MAC protocol in order to provide the ability of the transmission of non-safety message with little impact on the reliability of transmitting safety message even if the traffic and communication densities are high. VANET is a highly dynamic network. With lack of specialized hardware for infrastructure and the mobility to support network stability and channel utilization, acluster-based MAC protocol is needed to solve these overcomes. This dissertation makes the following contributions: 1. A multi-channel cluster-based TDMA MAC protocol to coordinate intracluster communications (TC-MAC) 2. A CH election and cluster formation algorithm based on the traffic flow and a cluster maintenance algorithm that benefits from our cluster formation algorithm 3. A multi-channel cluster-based CDNIA/TDMA hybrid MAC protocol to coordinate inter-cluster communications I will show that TC-MAC provides better performance than the current WAVE standard in terms of safety/update message reliability and non-safety message delivery. Additionally, I will show that my clustering and cluster maintenance protocol provides more stable clusters, which will reduce the overhead of clusterhead election and re-clustering and leads to an efficient hierarchical network topology

Resource Allocation and Mobility Prediction Algorithms for Multimedia Wireless Cellular Networks

Among the issues the telecommunication industry is the demand for multimedia applications with Quality of Service (QoS) in wireless/mobile networks. In the face of this increasingly complex traffic mix, where each service imposes different requirements, QoS provisioning and guarantee for multimedia services have become increasingly important. This is partially due to the users' requirements and poses a difficult challenge for network service providers. The tasks are more challenging than those in the wired networks due to the shortage of resources and the mobility present in wireless networks. The mobility factor causes severe fluctuations of resource usage. In this research, the QoS provisioning and resource utilization for multimedia services in wireless/mobile networks aspects are addressed. The first proposed scheme is called Adaptive Multi-Class Services Controller scheme (AMCSC). This scheme harnesses the combinations of Call Admission Control (CAC), an Adaptive Bandwidth Allocation (ABA) algorithm with micro-Acceptable Bandwidth Level (micro-ABL) and the Connection Management Table (CMT). The specific objective in designing the AMCSC Scheme is to reduce the New Connection Blocking Probability (NCBP) and the Handoff Connection Dropping Probability (HCDP) by managing resource allocation to address. The insufficient resource problem is experienced by the MTs. This scheme supports multiple classes of non-adaptive and adaptive multimedia services with diverse QoS requirements. The second proposed scheme is a bandwidth reservation scheme based on Mobility Prediction Scheme (MPS). Two proposed MPSs are deployed to predict the mobility movement of mobiles. The first MPS obtains the user mobility information by Received Signal Strength (RSS) which also includes the direction of the MT. This is enhanced based also on the position of the MT within a sector and zones of the cell. The second MPS obtains the user mobility information using the road map information of the cell and the integrated RSS and Global Position System (GPS) measurements. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme enhances the estimation of the target cell. This shown by the reduction of the signalling traffic in wireless cellular networks, reduction of the number of terminated ongoing calls of non-real time traffic and reduction of the number of cancelled reservation due to false reservation. The third proposed framework is an integration of the AMCSC scheme and the bandwidth reservation done based on the MPS. This integration is used to achieve the ideal balance between the users' QoS guarantee of multiple classes of wireless multimedia and maximizing the bandwidth utilization. The performance result of the proposed framework has proven to improve the achieved performance metrics. The performances analysis in this research is discrete simulation. The proposed schemes have proven to enhance the performance in terms of NCBP and HCDP for each type of traffic, management the resource for multiple traffics with diverse requirement, bandwidth utilization and predicting the target cell in the right time and place

Traffic flow reconstruction by solving indeterminacy on traffic distribution at junctions

Abstract The knowledge of the real time traffic flow status in each segment of a whole road network in a city or area is becoming fundamental for a large number of smart services such as: routing, planning, dynamic tuning services, healthy walk, etc. Rescue teams, police department, and ambulances need to know with high precision the status of the network in real time. On the other hand, the costs to obtain this information either with direct measures meant to add instruments on the whole network or acquiring data from international providers such as Google, TomTom, etc. is very high. The traditional modeling and computing approaches are not satisfactory since they are based on many assumptions that typically are doomed to change over time, as it occurs with traffic distribution at junctions; in short they cannot cover the whole network with the needed precision. In this paper, the above problem has been addressed providing a solution granting any traffic flow reconstruction with high precision and solving the indeterminacy of traffic distribution at junctions for large networks. The identified solution can be classified as a stochastic relaxation technique and resulted affordable on a parallel architecture based on GPU. The result has been obtained in the framework of the Sii-Mobility national project on smart city transport systems in Italy, a very large research project, and it is at present exploited in a number of cities/regions across Europe and by a number of research projects (Snap4City, TRAFAIR) of the European Commission

How to monitor sustainable mobility in cities? Literature review in the frame of creating a set of sustainable mobility indicators

The role of sustainable mobility and its impact on society and the environment is evident and recognized worldwide. Nevertheless, although there is a growing number of measures and projects that deal with sustainable mobility issues, it is not so easy to compare their results and, so far, there is no globally applicable set of tools and indicators that ensure holistic evaluation and facilitate replicability of the best practices. In this paper, based on the extensive literature review, we give a systematic overview of relevant and scientifically sound indicators that cover different aspects of sustainable mobility that are applicable in different social and economic contexts around the world. Overall, 22 sustainable mobility indicators have been selected and an overview of the applied measures described across the literature review has been presented

VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving