Street Smart in 5G : Vehicular Applications, Communication, and Computing

Recent advances in information technology have revolutionized the automotive industry, paving the way for next-generation smart vehicular mobility. Specifically, vehicles, roadside units, and other road users can collaborate to deliver novel services and applications that leverage, for example, big vehicular data and machine learning. Relatedly, fifth-generation cellular networks (5G) are being developed and deployed for low-latency, high-reliability, and high bandwidth communications. While 5G adjacent technologies such as edge computing allow for data offloading and computation at the edge of the network thus ensuring even lower latency and context-awareness. Overall, these developments provide a rich ecosystem for the evolution of vehicular applications, communications, and computing. Therefore in this work, we aim at providing a comprehensive overview of the state of research on vehicular computing in the emerging age of 5G and big data. In particular, this paper highlights several vehicular applications, investigates their requirements, details the enabling communication technologies and computing paradigms, and studies data analytics pipelines and the integration of these enabling technologies in response to application requirements.Peer reviewe

Suporte a gerenciamento do trânsito baseado em computação na névoa para os sistemas de transporte inteligentes

Orientadores: Leandro Aparecido Villas, Daniel Ludovico GuidoniTese (doutorado) ¿ Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: O trânsito nos grandes centros urbanos contribui com problemas que vão desde diminuição da qualidade de vida e segurança da população até o aumento de custos financeiros às pessoas, cidades e empresas. Um dos motivos para um maior tráfego de veículos é o vertiginoso crescimento populacional dos centros urbanos. Além disso, o fluxo de veículos é prejudicado por situações adversas recorrentes nas vias, como o aumento súbito do tráfego durante os horários de pico, gargalos nas infraestruturas de transporte, e acidentes de trânsito. Com o avanço das tecnologias de comunicação, processamento e sensoriamento, os Sistemas de Transporte Inteligentes (ITS) surgem como uma alternativa para mitigar esses problemas. A interoperabilidade dos ITS com novas tecnologias tais como as redes veiculares (VANETs) e computação em névoa, os tornam mais promissores e eficazes. As VANETs preveem que veículos possuam poder computacional e capacidade de comunicação sem fio com outros veículos e com as infraestruturas fixa de comunicação, assim, uma nova gama de serviços de segurança e entretenimento aos motoristas e passageiros podem ser desenvolvidas. Entretanto, estes tipos de serviços, em especial o de gerenciamento de trânsito, demandam uma análise contínua das condições de fluxo de veículos nas vias e um vasto recurso de rede e processamento, tornando o desenvolvimento de soluções para ITS mais complexo e de difícil escalabilidade. A computação em névoa é uma infraestrutura de computação descentralizada na qual dados, processamento, armazenamento e aplicações são distribuídos na borda da rede, assim, aumentando a escalabilidade do sistema. Na literatura, os sistemas de gerenciamento de tráfego não tratam de maneira adequada o problema de escalabilidade, implicando em problemas relacionados ao balanceamento de carga e tempo de resposta. Esta tese de doutorado propõe um sistema de gerenciamento de tráfego baseado no paradigma de computação em névoa, para detectar, classificar e controlar o congestionamento de tráfego. O sistema proposto apresenta um framework distribuído e escalável que reduz os problemas supracitados em relação ao estado da arte. Para tanto, utilizando da natureza distribuída da computação em névoa, a solução implementa um algoritmo de roteamento probabilístico que faz o balanceamento do tráfego e evita o problema de deslocamento de congestionamentos para outras regiões. Utilizando às características da computação em névoa, foi desenvolvida uma metodologia distribuída baseada em regiões que faz a coleta de dados e classificação das vias em relação às condições do trânsito compartilhadas pelos veículos. Finalmente, foi desenvolvido um conjunto de algoritmos/protocolos de comunicação que comparado com outras soluções da literatura, reduz a perda de pacotes e o número de mensagens transmitidas. O serviço proposto foi comparado extensivamente com outras soluções da literatura em relação às métricas de trânsito, onde o sistema proposto foi capaz de reduzir em até 70% o tempo parado e em até 49% o planning time index. Considerando as métricas de comunicação, o serviço proposto é capaz de reduzir em até 12% a colisão de pacotes alcançando uma cobertura de 98% do cenário. Os resultados mostram que o framework baseado em computação em névoa desenvolvido, melhora o fluxo de veículos de forma eficiente e escalávelAbstract: Traffic in large urban centers contributes to problems that range from decreasing the population¿s quality of life and security to increasing financial costs for people, cities, and companies. One of the reasons for increased vehicle traffic is the population growth in urban centers. Moreover, vehicle flow is hampered by recurring adverse situations on roads, such as the sudden increase in vehicle traffic during peak hours, bottlenecks in transportation infrastructure, and traffic accidents. Considering the advance of communication, processing, and sensing technologies, Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) have emerged as an alternative to mitigate these problems. The interoperability of ITS with new technologies, such as vehicular networks (VANETs) and Fog computing, make them more promising and effective. VANETs ensure that vehicles have the computing power and wireless communication capabilities with other vehicles and with fixed communication infrastructures; therefore, a new range of security and entertainment services for drivers and passengers can be developed. However, these types of services, especially traffic management, demand a continuous analysis of vehicle flow conditions on roads and a huge network and processing resource, making the development of ITS solutions more complex and difficult to scale. Fog computing is a decentralized computing infrastructure in which data, processing, storage, and applications are distributed at the network edge, thereby increasing the system¿s scalability. In the literature, traffic management systems do not adequately address the scalability problem, resulting in load balancing and response time problems. This doctoral thesis proposes a traffic management system based on the Fog computing paradigm to detect, classify, and control traffic congestion. The proposed system presents a distributed and scalable framework that reduces the aforementioned problems in relation to state of the art. Therefore, using Fog computing¿s distributed nature, the solution implements a probabilistic routing algorithm that balances traffic and avoids the problem of congestion displacement to other regions. Using the characteristics of Fog computing, a distributed methodology was developed based on regions that collect data and classify the roads concerning the traffic conditions shared by the vehicles. Finally, a set of communication algorithms/protocols was developed which, compared with other literature solutions, reduces packet loss and the number of messages transmitted. The proposed service was compared extensively with other solutions in the literature regarding traffic metrics, where the proposed system was able to reduce downtime by up to 70% and up to 49% of the planning time index. Considering communication metrics, the proposed service can reduce packet collision by up to 12% reaching 98% coverage of the scenario. The results show that the framework based on Fog computing developed improves the vehicles¿ flow efficiently and in a scalable wayDoutoradoCiência da ComputaçãoDoutor em Ciência da Computaçã

An empirical investigation of performance challenges within context‐aware content sharing for vehicular ad hoc networks

Connected vehicles is a leading use-case within the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which is aimed at automating a range of driving tasks such as navigation, accident avoidance, content sharing and auto-driving. Such systems leverage Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) and include vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to roadside infrastructure (V2I) communication along with remote systems such as traffic alerts and weather reports. However, the device endpoints in such networks are typically resource-constrained and, therefore, leverage edge computing, wireless communications and data analytics to improve the overall driving experience, influencing factors such as safety, reliability, comfort, response and economic efficiency. Our focus in this paper is to identify and highlight open challenges to achieve a secure and efficient convergence between the constrained IoT devices and the high-performance capabilities offered by the clouds. Therein, we present a context-aware content sharing scenario for VANETs and identify specific requirements for its achievement. We also conduct a comparative study of simulation software for edge computing paradigm to identify their strengths and weaknesses, especially within the context of VANETs. We use FogNetSim++ to simulate diverse settings within VANETs with respect to latency and data rate highlighting challenges and opportunities for future research

A Case Study of Edge Computing Implementations: Multi-access Edge Computing, Fog Computing and Cloudlet

With the explosive growth of intelligent and mobile devices, the current centralized cloud computing paradigm is encountering difficult challenges. Since the primary requirements have shifted towards implementing real-time response and supporting context awareness and mobility, there is an urgent need to bring resources and functions of centralized clouds to the edge of networks, which has led to the emergence of the edge computing paradigm. Edge computing increases the responsibilities of network edges by hosting computation and services, therefore enhancing performances and improving quality of experience (QoE). Fog computing, multi-access edge computing (MEC), and cloudlet are three typical and promising implementations of edge computing. Fog computing aims to build a system that enables cloud-to-thing service connectivity and works in concert with clouds, MEC is seen as a key technology of the fifth generation (5G) system, and Cloudlet is a micro-data center deployed in close proximity. In terms of deployment scenarios, Fog computing focuses on the Internet of Things (IoT), MEC mainly provides mobile RAN application solutions for 5G systems, and cloudlet offloads computing power at the network edge. In this paper, we present a comprehensive case study on these three edge computing implementations, including their architectures, differences, and their respective application scenario in IoT, 5G wireless systems, and smart edge. We discuss the requirements, benefits, and mechanisms of typical co-deployment cases for each paradigm and identify challenges and future directions in edge computing