Performance tuning of a smartphone-based overtaking assistant

ITS solutions suffer from the slow pace of adoption by manufacturers despite the interest shown by both consumers and industry. Our goal is to develop ITS applications using already available technologies to make them affordable, quick to deploy, and easy to adopt. In this paper we introduce EYES, an overtaking assistance solution that provides drivers with a real-time video feed from the vehicle located just in front. Our application thus provides a better view of the road ahead, and of any vehicles travelling in the opposite direction, being especially useful when the front view of the driver is blocked by large vehicles. We evaluated our application using the MJPEG video encoding format, and have determined the most effective resolution and JPEG quality choice for our case. Experimental results from the tests performed with the application in both indoor and outdoor scenarios, allow us to be optimistic about the effectiveness and applicability of smartphones in providing overtaking assistance based on video streaming in vehicular networks

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Messiah: An ITS drive safety application

This article describes a novel safety application based on the open source navigation software OsmAnd, which runs on the Android platform. The application offers vehicles with "smart navigation", and maintains a network of the vehicles that use our application. The process of network creation and maintenance is important as our application enables vehicles to communicate with one another to exchange useful information. The main function of the application is to inform vehicles of relevant vehicles approaching, termed as "administrative vehicles" in this article, and include ambulances, police cars and fire brigades. Based on the received information, our application notifies the driver, who can now take navigation decisions based on it. While developing the application, problems were found when attempting to create an Ad-hoc network. A solution to the problem of managing the Ad-hoc network has been proposed and is under development

A novel on-board Unit to accelerate the penetration of ITS services

In-vehicle connectivity has experienced a big expansion in recent years. Car manufacturers have mainly proposed OBU-based solutions, but these solutions do not take full advantage of the opportunities of inter-vehicle peer-to-peer communications. In this paper we introduce GRCBox, a novel architecture that allows OEM user-devices to directly communicate when located in neighboring vehicles. In this paper we also describe EYES, an application we developed to illustrate the type of novel applications that can be implemented on top of the GRCBox. EYES is an ITS overtaking assistance system that provides the driver with real-time video fed from the vehicle located in front. Finally, we evaluated the GRCbox and the EYES application and showed that, for device-to-device communication, the performance of the GRCBox architecture is comparable to an infrastructure network, introducing a negligible impact

EYES : a novel overtaking assistance system for vehicular networks

Developments in the ITS area are received with great expectation by both consumers and industry. Despite their huge potential benefits, ITS solutions suffer from the slow pace of adoption by manufacturers. In this paper we propose EYES, an ITS system that aims at helping drivers in overtaking. The system autonomously creates a network of the devices running EYES, and provides drivers with a video feed from the vehicle located just ahead, thus presenting a better view of any vehicles coming from the opposite direction and the road ahead. This is specially useful when the front view of the driver is blocked by large vehicles, and thus the decision whether to overtake can be taken based on the visuals provided by the application. We have validated EYES, the proposed overtaking assistance system, in both indoor and realistic scenarios involving vehicular network, and preliminary results allow being optimistic about its effectiveness and applicability

BORDER: A Benchmarking Framework for Distributed MQTT Brokers

[EN] Message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT), one of the most popular application layer protocols for the Internet of Things, works according to a publish/subscribe paradigm where clients connect to a centralized broker. Sometimes (e.g., in high scalability and low-latency applications), it is required to depart from such a centralized approach and move to a distributed one, where multiple MQTT brokers cooperate together. Many MQTT brokers (both open source or commercially available) allow to create such a distributed environment: however, it is challenging to select the right solution due to the many available choices. This article proposes, therefore benchmarking framework for distributed MQTT brokers (BORDER), a framework for creating and evaluating distributed architectures of MQTT brokers with realistic and customizable network topologies. Based on isolated Docker containers and emulated network components, the framework provides quantitative metrics about the overall system performance, such as End-to-End latency as well as network and physical resources consumed. We use BORDER to compare five of the most popular MQTT brokers that allow the creation of distributed architectures and we release it as an open-source project to allow for reproducible researches.This work was supported in part by the Project BASE5G under Project 1155850 funded by Regione Lombardia within the framework POR FESR 2014-2020.Longo, E.; Redondi, A.; Cesana, M.; Manzoni, P. (2022). BORDER: A Benchmarking Framework for Distributed MQTT Brokers. IEEE Internet of Things. 9(18):17728-17740. https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2022.3155872177281774091

A Resilient LoRa-Based Solution to Support Pervasive Sensing

[EN] Today, billions of small devices that can sense things are connected, creating the Internet of Things (IoT). This major technological step has led to ideas like smart cities, smart factories, and smart countries. One important use of this technology is pervasive sensing, which could benefit from a network that covers a wide area but does not use much power. This paper looks closely at the advantages and disadvantages of using LoRa-a network technology that can reach long distances with limited energy use-in situations like this. To this aim, we have created a holistic solution to manage the considered network enabling synchronization, routing, and reliability. In particular, we have even developed an adaptive spreading factor mechanism, simple and effective in allowing the network to cope better when the connection is not very good.The authors of this paper acknowledge the support of MUR (Italian Ministry of University and Research) under the PON ex DM 1061 and the PNRR CN-MOST initiatives.Manzoni, P.; Merzougui, SE.; Palazzi, CE.; Pozzan, P. (2023). A Resilient LoRa-Based Solution to Support Pervasive Sensing. Electronics. 12(13). https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12132952121