Hybrid-Vehfog: A Robust Approach for Reliable Dissemination of Critical Messages in Connected Vehicles

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) enable efficient communication between vehicles with the aim of improving road safety. However, the growing number of vehicles in dense regions and obstacle shadowing regions like Manhattan and other downtown areas leads to frequent disconnection problems resulting in disrupted radio wave propagation between vehicles. To address this issue and to transmit critical messages between vehicles and drones deployed from service vehicles to overcome road incidents and obstacles, we proposed a hybrid technique based on fog computing called Hybrid-Vehfog to disseminate messages in obstacle shadowing regions, and multi-hop technique to disseminate messages in non-obstacle shadowing regions. Our proposed algorithm dynamically adapts to changes in an environment and benefits in efficiency with robust drone deployment capability as needed. Performance of Hybrid-Vehfog is carried out in Network Simulator (NS-2) and Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) simulators. The results showed that Hybrid-Vehfog outperformed Cloud-assisted Message Downlink Dissemination Scheme (CMDS), Cross-Layer Broadcast Protocol (CLBP), PEer-to-Peer protocol for Allocated REsource (PrEPARE), Fog-Named Data Networking (NDN) with mobility, and flooding schemes at all vehicle densities and simulation times

Crisis Analytics: Big Data Driven Crisis Response

Disasters have long been a scourge for humanity. With the advances in technology (in terms of computing, communications, and the ability to process and analyze big data), our ability to respond to disasters is at an inflection point. There is great optimism that big data tools can be leveraged to process the large amounts of crisis-related data (in the form of user generated data in addition to the traditional humanitarian data) to provide an insight into the fast-changing situation and help drive an effective disaster response. This article introduces the history and the future of big crisis data analytics, along with a discussion on its promise, challenges, and pitfalls

Distributed Hybrid Simulation of the Internet of Things and Smart Territories

This paper deals with the use of hybrid simulation to build and compose heterogeneous simulation scenarios that can be proficiently exploited to model and represent the Internet of Things (IoT). Hybrid simulation is a methodology that combines multiple modalities of modeling/simulation. Complex scenarios are decomposed into simpler ones, each one being simulated through a specific simulation strategy. All these simulation building blocks are then synchronized and coordinated. This simulation methodology is an ideal one to represent IoT setups, which are usually very demanding, due to the heterogeneity of possible scenarios arising from the massive deployment of an enormous amount of sensors and devices. We present a use case concerned with the distributed simulation of smart territories, a novel view of decentralized geographical spaces that, thanks to the use of IoT, builds ICT services to manage resources in a way that is sustainable and not harmful to the environment. Three different simulation models are combined together, namely, an adaptive agent-based parallel and distributed simulator, an OMNeT++ based discrete event simulator and a script-language simulator based on MATLAB. Results from a performance analysis confirm the viability of using hybrid simulation to model complex IoT scenarios.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1605.0487

Sources of Cardiovascular Health Information and Channels of Health Communication Among Urban Population in Nigeria

This study employed mixed methods to investigate the preferred sources of health information and later explored the views of community healthcare workers on the enablers, barriers and ways of overcoming barriers to health communication. The study found that majority of the participants preferred their source of CV (cardiovascular) health information from the healthcare workers including the medical doctors, nurses, and pharmacists. On the other hand, the least preferred source of health information was from friends, family members, and community leaders. Some of the identified enablers to community health communication include awareness programme via Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), community-based organisations such as faith-based organisations and healthcare facilities. Others are traditional media and social media. The identified barriers to community-based health communication include lack of knowledge and poverty, language barriers, and other miscellaneous issues including misuse of internet, lack of basic amenities and religious beliefs. The community-based healthcare providers articulated ways to overcome the identified barriers, including enlightenment programmes, using the language of the target audience, funding health awareness programmes, and monitoring of health education interventions. This study concludes that dissemination of health information using numerous channels is essential in ensuring population-wide primary prevention of diseases

Community and Social Media Use among Early PEV Drivers

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are now being offered for sale to consumers. Contemporaneously, multi-way social interactions among individuals, groups, businesses, governments, and other actors are increasingly facilitated by communication technologies: we take this to be “social media.” Can this confluence facilitate the formation of new interest-based communities among plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) buyers? How might this be important to promoting PEVs? This paper presents the results of 28 in-depth interviews with household PEV drivers in San Diego, California. These PEV drivers show wide variation in their descriptions of who they believe PEV drivers to be, conceptualizations of a PEV, uses of social media to engage other members of the community, and socially mediated and face-to-face interactions with other PEV drivers. Better understanding of the relationship between emerging PEV markets, social media and consumer-based communities will affect the ongoing management of transitions to electric-mobility

Emergency message dissemination schemes based on congestion avoidance in VANET and vehicular FoG computing

With the rapid growth in connected vehicles, FoG-assisted vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging and novel field of research. For information sharing, a number of messages are exchanged in various applications, including traffic monitoring and area-specific live weather and social aspects monitoring. It is quite challenging where vehicles' speed, direction, and density of neighbors on the move are not consistent. In this scenario, congestion avoidance is also quite challenging to avoid communication loss during busy hours or in emergency cases. This paper presents emergency message dissemination schemes that are based on congestion avoidance scenario in VANET and vehicular FoG computing. In the similar vein, FoG-assisted VANET architecture is explored that can efficiently manage the message congestion scenarios. We present a taxonomy of schemes that address message congestion avoidance. Next, we have included a discussion about comparison of congestion avoidance schemes to highlight the strengths and weaknesses. We have also identified that FoG servers help to reduce the accessibility delays and congestion as compared to directly approaching cloud for all requests in linkage with big data repositories. For the dependable applicability of FoG in VANET, we have identified a number of open research challenges. © 2013 IEEE