Ambulance-to-Traffic Light Controller Communications for Rescue Mission Enhancement:A Thailand Use Case

During rescue missions, transferring injured people from accident scenes to rescue sites is considered crucial and time-sensitive. In particular, a one-second delay could put more lives in danger. Though ambulances are commonly equipped with standard siren devices, such siren signals are not recognized by traffic light controllers. Therefore, rescue missions could be delayed at intersections due to an urgency-unaware traffic light control system. In the worst case, pile-up accidents could also happen when the ambulances lawfully ignores the traffic lights. This paper proposes A2T to enhance the efficiency of rescue missions, by establishing a communication mechanism among ambulances and infrastructures (e.g., traffic light controllers). Thailand, which had the highest road traffic death rate in the world in 2015, is selected as a use case in this paper. A2T promotes information sharing between ambulances and traffic light controllers along the rescue path in advance. Such information, including speeds, locations, and emergency routes, allows the traffic light controllers to launch a prioritized green traffic light accordingly. This allows the ambulances to go through any road intersection efficiently and safely. Our comprehensive performance evaluation shows that A2T achieves 100 percent waiting time reduction for the ambulances, with only 2.48 percent increase in delay of other vehicles at the intersections

Machine Learning based Beamwidth Adaptation for mmWave Vehicular Communications

© 2023, IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. This is the accepted manuscript version of a conference paper which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1109/MICC59384.2023.10419542The incorporation of mmWave technology in vehicular networks has unlocked a realm of possibilities, propelling the advancement of autonomous vehicles,enhancing interconnectedness, and facilitating communication for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Despite these strides in connectivity, challenges such as high path-loss have arisen, impacting existing beam management procedures. This work aims to address this issue by improving beam management techniques, specifically focusing on enhancing the service time between vehicles and base stations through adaptive mmWave beamwidth adjustments, accomplished using a Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit Algorithm. By leveraging various conditions to train the ML agent of the Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit Algorithm, it seeks to learn about vehicle mobility profiles and optimize the usage of differentantenna beamwidth settings to maximize seamless connection time. The extensive simulation results showcase the effectiveness of an adaptive beamwidth for mobility profiles, extending the connection time a vehicle experiences with a base station when compared to the existing strategies

EV Charging Recommendation Concerning Preemptive Service and Charging Urgency Policy

Compared with traditional internal combustion engine vehicles, Electric Vehicles (EVs) have the advantage of eliminating harmful gases in the environment, with great development potential in recent years. However, because the battery capacity of EVs is limited at the current stage, where to charge (to select charging station) and when/whether to charge (order the charging priority of EVs) still limit the large-scale popularity of EVs. In this paper, we develop an Urgency First Charging (UFC) charging scheduling policy, which takes the remaining parking time and charging time of EVs as the standard of charging priority. With this, the CS benefits to the shortest trip duration (summation of travelling time through CS, and charging service time at CS) is selected as optimal solution. We have conducted simulations through Helsinki's traffic scenarios. The results have shown that our proposed CS-Selection scheme effectively improves the charging comfort (in terms of waiting time and trip time) and charging efficiency (in terms of not-fully charged service due to limited parking duration)

Enhancing Video QoE Over High-speed Train Using Segment-based Prefetching and Caching

The big picture of 5G will bring a range of new unique service capabilities, where ensuring Quality of Experience (QoE) continuity in challenging situations such as high mobility, e.g. on-board User Equipments (UEs) in High Speed Train (HST) is one of sharp killer applications. In this paper, we propose a Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) driven solution to improve QoE, for UEs in the HST with perceived Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) video demands. Considering the challenging wireless communication conditioning (e.g., path loss and Doppler Effect due to high mobility) between HST and Base Station (BS) along the railway for enabling progress and seamless video consuming, the case study shows the benefit of MEC functions mainly from content prefetching and complementarily from content caching, over benchmark solution where UEs solely download video segments through challenging wireless channel

Multi-Hop Broadcast Protocols for Emergency Message Dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks.

Emergency Message (EM) dissemination in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) has attracted significant attention in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) in recent years. Such dissemination mechanisms mostly rely on licensed Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) systems such as IEEE 802.11p and IEEE P1609.1-4 standards. By timely broadcasting of emergency messages (EMs), drivers can avoid potentially dangerous accidents and experience a safer driving environment. As the result, a concern of the number of accidents is also reduced. Thus, an efficient broadcast protocol is required in this scenario. In this thesis, designs of robust broadcast protocols are considered for Emergency Message Dissemination in VANETs. It presents four innovative contributions. Firstly, a literature review as well as challenges and issues of the protocols designed for EM dissemination application are presented. Secondly, Priority-based Routing Protocol (PRP) and its reliability enhancement (PRP-RE) have been proposed as broadcast protocols for different types of EM disseminations, providing; 1) fully distributed broadcast protocol; 2) different Quality of Services (QoS) for different types of EMs; 3) maximum message dissemination distance per hop; and 4) high communication reliability. Thirdly, a more efficient and robust multi-hop broadcast protocol for time-critical EM disseminations is proposed as Trinary Partitioned Black-Burst based Broadcast Protocol (3P3B). A mini-DIFS in MAC sub-layer is introduced to give the time-critical EMs the highest priority access to the communication channel compared to other EMs. In addition, a trinary partitioning is designed to iteratively partition the communication area into small sectors, allowing only the furthest possible vehicle to perform EM forwarding. Therefore, 3P3B can increase dissemination speed and reduce contention period jitter. The performance evaluation results demonstrate that 3P3B outperforms benchmarks of the existing broadcast protocols in VANETs in terms of average message dissemination speed, message progress, communication delay, and packet delivery ratio. Finally, 3P3B-DTN is proposed based on an enhancement of 3P3B to deal with communications in a disruptive network with an introduction of EM store, carry, and forward to maximize packet delivery ratio while minimizing end-to-end delay. The performance evaluation results show that 3P3B-DTN achieves higher packet delivery ratio than 3P3B even when the network is disrupted with a trade-off of higher end-to-end delay and overhead for those EMs, which would be lost otherwise

Multi-Hop Broadcast Protocols for Emergency Message Dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks.

Emergency Message (EM) dissemination in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) has attracted significant attention in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) in recent years. Such dissemination mechanisms mostly rely on licensed Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) systems such as IEEE 802.11p and IEEE P1609.1-4 standards. By timely broadcasting of emergency messages (EMs), drivers can avoid potentially dangerous accidents and experience a safer driving environment. As the result, a concern of the number of accidents is also reduced. Thus, an efficient broadcast protocol is required in this scenario. In this thesis, designs of robust broadcast protocols are considered for Emergency Message Dissemination in VANETs. It presents four innovative contributions. Firstly, a literature review as well as challenges and issues of the protocols designed for EM dissemination application are presented. Secondly, Priority-based Routing Protocol (PRP) and its reliability enhancement (PRP-RE) have been proposed as broadcast protocols for different types of EM disseminations, providing; 1) fully distributed broadcast protocol; 2) different Quality of Services (QoS) for different types of EMs; 3) maximum message dissemination distance per hop; and 4) high communication reliability. Thirdly, a more efficient and robust multi-hop broadcast protocol for time-critical EM disseminations is proposed as Trinary Partitioned Black-Burst based Broadcast Protocol (3P3B). A mini-DIFS in MAC sub-layer is introduced to give the time-critical EMs the highest priority access to the communication channel compared to other EMs. In addition, a trinary partitioning is designed to iteratively partition the communication area into small sectors, allowing only the furthest possible vehicle to perform EM forwarding. Therefore, 3P3B can increase dissemination speed and reduce contention period jitter. The performance evaluation results demonstrate that 3P3B outperforms benchmarks of the existing broadcast protocols in VANETs in terms of average message dissemination speed, message progress, communication delay, and packet delivery ratio. Finally, 3P3B-DTN is proposed based on an enhancement of 3P3B to deal with communications in a disruptive network with an introduction of EM store, carry, and forward to maximize packet delivery ratio while minimizing end-to-end delay. The performance evaluation results show that 3P3B-DTN achieves higher packet delivery ratio than 3P3B even when the network is disrupted with a trade-off of higher end-to-end delay and overhead for those EMs, which would be lost otherwise

Multihop Broadcast Protocol in Intermittently Connected Vehicular Networks

There are great challenges in vehicular networks, i.e., continuous connectivity cannot be guaranteed due to interruptions. This paper proposes a novel multi-hop broadcasting protocol with low signaling overhead in vehicular networks with frequent interruptions named as Trinary Partitioned Black-Burst based Broadcast Protocol (3P3B-DTN). The protocol operates without any infrastructure. It has low overhead supporting different Quality of Service (QoS) levels. Both analysis and comprehensive simulations show that the proposed protocol outperforms the bench mark schemes

Impact of propagation environments on emergency message dissemination in VANETs

In this paper, we investigate the impacts of different radio propagation environments on the performance of emergency message dissemination Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). We compared the performances of the benchmark existing broadcast protocols for Emergency Message Dissemination in VANETs. We consider three different propagation models, namely, Log-Normal Shadowing, Longley-Rice, and Nakagami to model six different simulation scenarios of both highway and urban areas. The objective is to provide a qualitative assessment of the protocols applicability in different vehicular scenarios. It is demonstrated that Trinary Partition Black-Burst based Broadcast Protocol (3P3B) reduces the communication delay, increases dissemination speed, increase reliability, and outperforms the well-known existing broadcast protocols for emergency message dissemination in VANETs in all propagation environments. The benchmark protocols achieve high performance in various vehicular scenarios both in highway and urban areas. However, there is still some reliability issue needed to be addressed by all existing protocols, such as communications in a very crowded city where the received communication signal is strongly distorted

Applications of vehicular communications for reducing fuel consumption and CO₂ emission : the state of the art and research challenges

Environmental problems, such as pollution, become more serious year after year. One of the major causes is high fossil fuel consumption with CO2 emission. In 2009, 23 percent of CO2 emission globally came from land transportation systems, which is equal to 7000 million tons of CO2. This large amount of gas pollution should be reduced to slow down global environmental problems. Reduction of fuel consumption and CO2 emission in land transportation systems, which will have immediate positive economical and environmental impact, has become an important part of green technologies to alleviate global warming due to human activity. Intelligent transportation systems, which aim to use information and communication technology in the transportation systems, are considered to be a major enabler for the future green ITS. This article aims to provide a survey of the latest published applications based on vehicular communications as well as the envisaged technical challenges in this research area