Cooperation as a Service in VANET: Implementation and Simulation Results

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET), specializing from the well-known Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) to Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) wireless communications. While the original motivation for Vehicular Networks was to promote traffic safety, recently it has become increasingly obvious that Vehicular Networks open new vistas for Internet access, providing weather or road condition, parking availability, distributed gaming, and advertisement. In previous papers [27,28], we introduced Cooperation as a Service (CaaS); a new service-oriented solution which enables improved and new services for the road users and an optimized use of the road network through vehicle\u27s cooperation and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The current paper is an extension of the first ones; it describes an improved version of CaaS and provides its full implementation details and simulation results. CaaS structures the network into clusters, and uses Content Based Routing (CBR) for intra-cluster communications and DTN (Delay and disruption-Tolerant Network) routing for inter-cluster communications. To show the feasibility of our approach, we implemented and tested CaaS using Opnet modeler software package. Simulation results prove the correctness of our protocol and indicate that CaaS achieves higher performance as compared to an Epidemic approach

Are distributed ledger technologies ready for intelligent transportation systems?

none3noThe aim of this paper is to understand whether Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are ready to support complex services, such as those related to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). In smart transportation services, a huge amount of sensed data is generated by a multitude of vehicles. While DLTs provide very interesting features, such as immutability, traceability and verifiability of data, some doubts on the scalability and responsiveness of these technologies appear to be well-founded. We propose an architecture for ITS that resorts to DLT features. Moreover, we provide experimental results of a real test-bed over IOTA, a promising DLT for IoT. Results clearly show that, while the viability of the proposal cannot be rejected, further work is needed on the responsiveness of DLT infrastructures.openZichichi, Mirko; Ferretti, Stefano; D'Angelo, GabrieleZichichi, Mirko; Ferretti, Stefano; D'Angelo, Gabriel

A Reinforcement Learning Based Decision Support Tool for Epidemic Control: Validation Study for COVID-19

Epidemics such as COVID-19 present a substantial menace to public health and global economies. While the problem of epidemic forecasting has been thoroughly investigated in the literature, there is limited work studying the problem of optimal epidemic control. In the present paper, we introduce a novel epidemiological model (EM) that is inherently suitable for analyzing different control policies. We validated the potential of the developed EM in modeling the evolution of COVID-19 infections with a mean Pearson correlation of 0.609 CI 0.525–0.690 and P-value < 0.001. To automate the process of analyzing control policies and finding the optimal one, we adapted the developed EM to the reinforcement learning (RL) setting and ran several experiments. The results of this work show that the problem of optimal epidemic control can be significantly difficult for governments and policymakers, especially if faced with several constraints at once, hence, the need for such machine learning-based decision support tools. Moreover, it demonstrated the potential of deep RL in addressing such real-world problems

Cooperation as a Service in VANETs

Vehicular Networks, including Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs) and Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSNs), stimulate a brand new variety of services, ranging from driver safety services, traffic information and warnings regarding traffic jams and accidents, to providing weather or road condition, parking availability, and advertisement. 3G networks and sophisticated Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), including deploying costly roadside base stations, can indeed be used to offer such services, but these come with a cost, both at network and hardware levels. In this paper we introduce Cooperation as a service (CaaS): A novel architecture that will allow providing a set of services for free and without any additional infrastructure, by taking advantage of Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications. CaaS uses a hybrid publish/subscribe mechanism where the driver (or subscriber) expresses his interests regarding a service (or a set of services) and where cars having subscribed to the same service will cooperate to provide the subscriber with the necessary information regarding the service he subscribed to, by publishing this information in the network. CaaS structures the network into clusters, and uses Content Based Routing (CBR) for intra-cluster communications and geographic routing for inter-cluster communications

Comprehensive miscarriage dataset for an early miscarriage prediction

We present risk factors for predicting miscarriage. Our data is created through an android mobile application that collects automatically real-time data about the pregnant woman. This process is done every 60 s while the mobile application is on active mode. We distinguish two types of data: data from mobile phone and data from healthcare sensors. Data generated is real and concerns real pregnant women to test and validate the proposed system and assess its performance and effectiveness