Improving VANET Protocols via Network Science

Developing routing protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is a significant challenge in these large, self- organized and distributed networks. We address this challenge by studying VANETs from a network science perspective to develop solutions that act locally but influence the network performance globally. More specifically, we look at snapshots from highway and urban VANETs of different sizes and vehicle densities, and study parameters such as the node degree distribution, the clustering coefficient and the average shortest path length, in order to better understand the networks' structure and compare it to structures commonly found in large real world networks such as small-world and scale-free networks. We then show how to use this information to improve existing VANET protocols. As an illustrative example, it is shown that, by adding new mechanisms that make use of this information, the overhead of the urban vehicular broadcasting (UV-CAST) protocol can be reduced substantially with no significant performance degradation.Comment: Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC), Korea, November 201

Characterization of wavelength interleaving in radio-over-fiber systems employing WDM/SCM

A radio-over-fiber (RoF) distribution system incorporating both sub-carrier multiplexing and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technologies is presented. This signal is directly modulated onto three high-speed lasers. Bragg filters are employed at the receiver base station in order to both demultiplex the required optical channel, and ensure that the detected signal is single side band (in order to overcome dispersion limitations of the link). System spectral efficiency is optimised by wavelength interleaving. The channel spacing between the WDM channels is varied and the system performance for different values of channel spacing and spectral efficiencies is investigated. The results show that wavelength interleaving is a reliable technique that could be used to increase the spectral efficiency of RoF systems