iTETRIS: An Integrated Wireless and Traffic Platform for Real-Time Road Traffic Management Solutions

Wireless vehicular cooperative systems have been identified as an attractive solution to improve road traffic management, thereby contributing to the European goal of safer, cleaner, and more efficient and sustainable traffic solutions. V2V-V2I communication technologies can improve traffic management through real-time exchange of data among vehicles and with road infrastructure. It is also of great importance to investigate the adequate combination of V2V and V2I technologies to ensure the continuous and costefficient operation of traffic management solutions based on wireless vehicular cooperative solutions. However, to adequately design and optimize these communication protocols and analyze the potential of wireless vehicular cooperative systems to improve road traffic management, adequate testbeds and field operational tests need to be conducted. Despite the potential of Field Operational Tests to get the first insights into the benefits and problems faced in the development of wireless vehicular cooperative systems, there is yet the need to evaluate in the long term and large dimension the true potential benefits of wireless vehicular cooperative systems to improve traffic efficiency. To this aim, iTETRIS is devoted to the development of advanced tools coupling traffic and wireless communication simulators

Vehicular Fog Computing Enabled Real-time Collision Warning via Trajectory Calibration

Vehicular fog computing (VFC) has been envisioned as a promising paradigm for enabling a variety of emerging intelligent transportation systems (ITS). However, due to inevitable as well as non-negligible issues in wireless communication, including transmission latency and packet loss, it is still challenging in implementing safety-critical applications, such as real-time collision warning in vehicular networks. In this paper, we present a vehicular fog computing architecture, aiming at supporting effective and real-time collision warning by offloading computation and communication overheads to distributed fog nodes. With the system architecture, we further propose a trajectory calibration based collision warning (TCCW) algorithm along with tailored communication protocols. Specifically, an application-layer vehicular-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication delay is fitted by the Stable distribution with real-world field testing data. Then, a packet loss detection mechanism is designed. Finally, TCCW calibrates real-time vehicle trajectories based on received vehicle status including GPS coordinates, velocity, acceleration, heading direction, as well as the estimation of communication delay and the detection of packet loss. For performance evaluation, we build the simulation model and implement conventional solutions including cloud-based warning and fog-based warning without calibration for comparison. Real-vehicle trajectories are extracted as the input, and the simulation results demonstrate that the effectiveness of TCCW in terms of the highest precision and recall in a wide range of scenarios

From Vehicular Networks to IoT for Smart Roads: How a Communication Engineer Can Help Solve Transportation Problems (Invited Talk)

Intelligent transportation system (ITS) is an important development that applies advanced sensing, communication, big data analysis and control technologies to ground transportation in order to improve safety, mobility and efficiency. This talk will begin with a brief introduction to our work in vehicular networks, which started more than ten years ago. As we delve deeper into vehicular networks and interact more frequently with transportation stakeholders, we realize that ITS is a truly cross-disciplinary area, in order for vehicular networks to achieve its desired impact, we need to think beyond the traditional communication domain, and start to ponder the deeper-level questions of what fundamental changes can be brought by advanced sensing and communication techniques to transportation and how the applications of advanced sensing and communication techniques can help solve crucial transportation problems. To this end, we will introduce our more recent work of developing advanced IoT technology to transform our roads into smart roads, which in the shorter term, make our roads safer and more efficient while providing the fine-grained real-time traffic information for traffic management; in the longer term, provide the much-needed road infrastructure support for the future booming CAV revolution