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

A comparative study of two automated workgroup composition strategies

[EN] Nowadays, the professional environment of leading companies requires multidisciplinary teams to be created, including both internal and external experts, to adequately face the challenges of a fast-evolving and complex market. For newcomers, this situation can be difficult to handle if no previous experiences allowed preparing them for those situations. This is where college education finds its place, and in fact the curricula of different university careers are being updated to include more transversal competences like leadership and cooperation skills within groups. However, such efforts still remain at an amateur level in most cases due to lack of specific expertise by the majority of instructors, due to limitations in terms of creating actual multidisciplinary groups, and due to the little resources available to maximize the benefits of such experiences. Students also show little involvement in this issue, typically opting for approaches that minimize their efforts. Thus, simple and yet effective strategies that can be helpful for instructors to make a meaningful change to the current status quo are necessary. To address this need, in this paper we present the results of a 2-year study where students were forced to team up with other partners based on the results of a computer networking skills-ranking exam. In the first experiment, groups where formed by students achieving a similar performance (homogeneous), while in the second experiment groups were formed so that the average score of group members was the same (mostly heterogeneous). Through detailed survey results taken by students at the end of both courses, we find that, compared to an alternative group assignment strategy promoting group heterogeneity, having partners with similar skills does not help at improving the coordination between group members nor students perception about the usefulness of the experience towards future jobs. In fact, their rating of the overall experience was mostly the same, and, to our surprise, the partner expertise on the course topics was not a motivating factor, being that students complaints were always about not being able to decide about their partner. Thus, we consider that a simple strategy to define groups (e.g. randomly) suffices, but it should be adopted on all courses since the first year of the degree.Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Tornell, SM.; Arlandis, J. (2016). A comparative study of two automated workgroup composition strategies. En INTED2016 Proceedings. IATED Digital Library. 5890-5899. doi:10.21125/inted.2016.0409S5890589

Assessing the effectiveness of DTN techniques under realistic urban environments

© 2013 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[EN] Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) require collecting and distributing as much relevant information as possible to provide their services. Such information could also offer new possibilities to various service providers in the wider Smart City context. The distribution of this intelligence is carried out through various vehicular networking strategies, the most flexible of all being Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN). DTN protocols can cope with the problems derived from high mobility and the possibility of high node sparsity. Nevertheless, achieving a fair comparison of DTN solutions in an urban environment is a hard task. In this paper we present a generic DTN model that we use to compare various representative DTN solutions in a metropolitan scenario. We highlight the weak and strong points of each evaluated proposal by also taking into consideration different sending strategies adopted to improve the performance of DTN protocols.This work was partially supported by the Ministerio de Econom´ıa y Competitividad, Spain, under Grants TIN2011-27543-C03-01 and BES-2012-052673 and by the Universitat Politecnica de Val ` encia through the ABATIS project (PAID- `05-12).Tornell, SM.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Cano Escribá, JC.; Manzoni, P. (2013). Assessing the effectiveness of DTN techniques under realistic urban environments. En Local Computer Networks (LCN), 2013 IEEE 38th Conference on. IEEE. 573-580. https://doi.org/10.1109/LCN.2013.6761293S57358

Evaluating the feasibility of using smartphones for ITS safety applications

“©2013 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.Driving security and comfort can be improved by applying Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) proposals. The low adoption rate of new ITS hardware and software products is slowing down the market introduction of these solutions. In this paper we present a driving safety application for smartphones based on a warning dissemination protocol called eMDR. The use of smartphones minimizes the hardware cost and eliminates most of the adoption barriers; users will no longer have to install new dedicated devices in their vehicles. Instead, they will simply have to install an application in their smartphone. Our application is integrated with a Navigation System which provides access to road maps, current location, and route information. We analyzed the behavior of the wireless channel and the GPS location service under different conditions to assess the feasibility of our proposal. Results showed that, in C2C communications, smartphones are able to provide a reasonable degree of connectivity, and that the degree of precision achieved is enough for certain types of driving safety applications.This work was partially supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain, under Grants TIN2011-27543-C03-01 and BES-2012-052673.Tornell, SM.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Cano Escribá, JC.; Manzoni, P.; Fogue, M.; Martínez, FJ. (2013). Evaluating the feasibility of using smartphones for ITS safety applications. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/VTCSpring.2013.6692553

VACaMobil: VANET Car Mobility Manager for OMNeT++

©2013 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.The performance of communication protocols in vehicular networks highly depends on the mobility pattern. Therefore, one of the most important issues when simulating this kind of protocols is how to properly model vehicular mobility. In this paper we present VACaMobil, a VANET Car Mobility Manager for the OMNeT++ simulator which allows researchers to completely define vehicular mobility by setting the desired average number of vehicles along with its upper and lower bounds. We compare VACaMobil against other common methods employed to generate vehicular mobility. Results clearly show the advantages of the VACaMobil tool when distributing vehicles in a real scenario, becoming one of the best mobility generators to evaluate the performance of different communication protocols and algorithms in VANET environments.This work was partially supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain, under Grants TIN2011-27543-C03-01 and BES-2012-052673, and by the Ministerio de Educación, Spain, under the FPU program, AP2010-4397, AP2009-2415.Báguena Albaladejo, M.; Tornell, SM.; Torres Cortés, Á.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Cano Escribá, JC.; Manzoni, P. (2013). VACaMobil: VANET Car Mobility Manager for OMNeT++. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCW.2013.6649393

Simplifying the in-vehicle connectivity for ITS applications

[EN] In-vehicle connectivity has experienced a big expansion in recent years; car manufacturers are very active in this sense, and are proposing OBU oriented solutions. This effort is justified by the user demands for always-on connectivity. However, currently available OBUs do not provide the desired flexibility and simplicity of use that would be desirable for ITS applications. For example, none of them considers the possibility for inter-vehicle device-to-device communications. In this paper we present GRCBox, an architecture that extends the in-vehicle connectivity by providing inter and invehicular communication support. By creating private vehicular networks, GRCBox allows user devices’ applications to perform direct peer-to-peer communication. In this paper we describe the GRCBox design along with four case studies. We also include the experimental results obtained from a test-bed to show that our solution does not have a negative impact on the performance when compared to a centralized solution.This work was partially supported by the Ministerio de Econom´ıa y Competitividad, Programa Estatal de Investigaci´on, Desarrollo e Innovaci´on Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad, Proyectos I+D+I 2014, Spain, under Grant TEC2014-52690-R, BES-2012-052673 and EEBB-I-14-07890.Tornell, SM.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Cano Escribá, JC.; Manzoni, P.; Kärkkäinen, T.; Ott, J. (2015). Simplifying the in-vehicle connectivity for ITS applications. EAI Endorsed Transactions on Energy Web. 2(7):1-10. https://doi.org/10.4108/eai.22-7-2015.2260058S1102

GRCBox: Extending Smartphone Connectivity in Vehicular Networks

The low penetration of connectivity-enabled OBUs is delaying the deployment of Vehicular Networks (VNs), and therefore the development of Vehicular Delay Tolerant Network (VDTN) applications, among others. In this paper we present GRCBox, an architecture based on RaspberryPi that allows integrating smartphones in VNs. GRCBox is based on a low-cost device that combines several pieces of software to provide ad-hoc and multi-interface connectivity to smartphones. Using GRCBox each application can choose the interface for its data flows, which increases flexibility and will allow developers to easily implement applications based on ad-hoc connectivity, such as VDTN applications.This work was partially supported by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, Spain, under Grants TIN2011-27543-C03-01 and BES-2012-052673, and by the European Commission under Svagata.eu, the Erasmus Mundus Programme, Action 2 (EMA2).Martínez Tornell, S.; Patra, S.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Cano Escribá, JC.; Manzoni, P. (2015). GRCBox: Extending Smartphone Connectivity in Vehicular Networks. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks. 2015:1-13. doi:10.1155/2015/478064S1132015Hartenstein, H., & Laberteaux, K. P. (2008). A tutorial survey on vehicular ad hoc networks. IEEE Communications Magazine, 46(6), 164-171. doi:10.1109/mcom.2008.4539481Wu, H., Palekar, M., Fujimoto, R., Guensler, R., Hunter, M., Lee, J., & Ko, J. (2005). An empirical study of short range communications for vehicles. Proceedings of the 2nd ACM international workshop on Vehicular ad hoc networks - VANET ’05. doi:10.1145/1080754.1080769Jerbi, M., Senouci, S.-M., & Haj, M. A. (2007). Extensive Experimental Characterization of Communications in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks within Different Environments. 2007 IEEE 65th Vehicular Technology Conference - VTC2007-Spring. doi:10.1109/vetecs.2007.533Lee, K. C., Lee, S., Cheung, R., Lee, U., & Gerla, M. (2007). First Experience with CarTorrent in a Real Vehicular Ad Hoc Network Testbed. 2007 Mobile Networking for Vehicular Environments. doi:10.1109/move.2007.4300814Giordano, E., Tomatis, A., Ghosh, A., Pau, G., & Gerla, M. (2008). C-VeT An Open Research Platform for VANETs: Evaluation of Peer to Peer Applications in Vehicular Networks. 2008 IEEE 68th Vehicular Technology Conference. doi:10.1109/vetecf.2008.462Cesana, M., Fratta, L., Gerla, M., Giordano, E., & Pau, G. (2010). C-VeT the UCLA campus vehicular testbed: Integration of VANET and Mesh networks. 2010 European Wireless Conference (EW). doi:10.1109/ew.2010.5483535Santa, J., Tsukada, M., Ernst, T., & Gomez-Skarmeta, A. F. (2009). Experimental analysis of multi-hop routing in vehicular ad-hoc networks. 2009 5th International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks & Communities and Workshops. doi:10.1109/tridentcom.2009.4976248Paula, M. C. G., Isento, J. N., Dias, J. A., & Rodrigues, J. J. P. C. (2011). A real-world VDTN testbed for advanced vehicular services and applications. 2011 IEEE 16th International Workshop on Computer Aided Modeling and Design of Communication Links and Networks (CAMAD). doi:10.1109/camad.2011.5941108Campbell, A., & Choudhury, T. (2012). From Smart to Cognitive Phones. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 11(3), 7-11. doi:10.1109/mprv.2012.41Vandenberghe, W., Moerman, I., & Demeester, P. (2011). On the feasibility of utilizing smartphones for vehicular ad hoc networking. 2011 11th International Conference on ITS Telecommunications. doi:10.1109/itst.2011.6060061Sawada, D., Sato, M., Uehara, K., & Murai, J. (2011). iDANS: A platform for disseminating information on a VANET consisting of smartphone nodes. 2011 11th International Conference on ITS Telecommunications. doi:10.1109/itst.2011.6060062Tornell, S. M., Calafate, C. T., Cano, J.-C., Manzoni, P., Fogue, M., & Martinez, F. J. (2013). Evaluating the Feasibility of Using Smartphones for ITS Safety Applications. 2013 IEEE 77th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Spring). doi:10.1109/vtcspring.2013.6692553Mitchell, G. (2012). The Raspberry Pi single-board computer will revolutionise computer science teaching. Engineering & Technology, 7(3), 26-26. doi:10.1049/et.2012.0300Fielding R. T.Architectural styles and the design of network-based software architectures [Ph.D. thesis]2000University of Californi

DTN Protocols for Vehicular Networks: An Application Oriented Overview

© 2014 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 survey provides an in-depth analysis of the different proposals for Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks (VDTNs). We introduce the DTN architecture and classify VDTN proposals according to the type of knowledge needed to route messages. This classification also includes some Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) protocols originally designed for Opportunistic Networks to illustrate the evolution from Opportunistic DTN protocols to VDTN protocols. We also identify a set of common mechanisms that can be applied to almost all the VDTN protocols, heavily influencing their performance. Finally, we present some applications where VDTNs can be applicable and evaluate the suitability of the different proposals for each specific application. Moreover, this survey is not only limited to describing the different protocols but also focuses on the reproducibility and repeatability of experiments. With this in mind, we also review the evaluation methods used by VDTN researchers. We identify a lack of realism in most of the simulation models used by the VDTN research community, providing certain guidelines to address this issue.This work was supported in part by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, Spain, under Grants TIN2011-27543-C03-01 and BES-2012-052673.Tornell, SM.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Cano Escribá, JC.; Manzoni, P. (2015). DTN Protocols for Vehicular Networks: An Application Oriented Overview. Communications Surveys and Tutorials, IEEE Communications Society. 17(2):868-887. doi:10.1109/COMST.2014.2375340S86888717