Exploring analytical models for proactive resource management in highly mobile environments

In order to provide ubiquitous communication, seamless connectivity is now required in all environments including highly mobile networks. By using vertical handover techniques it is possible to provide uninterrupted communication as connections are dynamically switched between wireless networks as users move around. However, in a highly mobile environment, traditional reactive approaches to handover are inadequate. Therefore, proactive handover techniques, in which mobile nodes attempt to determine the best time and place to handover to local networks, are actively being investigated in the context of next-generation mobile networks. Using this approach, it is possible to enhance channel allocation and resource management by using probabilistic mechanisms; because, it is possible to explicitly detect contention for resources. This paper presents a proactive approach for resource allocation in highly mobile networks and analyzed the user contention for common resources such as radio channels in highly mobile wireless networks. The proposed approach uses an analytical modelling approach to model the contention and results are obtained showing enhanced system performance. Based on these results an operational space has been explored and are shown to be useful for emerging future networks such as 5G by allowing base stations to calculate the probability of contention based on the demand for network resources. This study indicates that the proactive model enhances handover and resource allocation for highly mobile networks. This paper analyzed the effects of and alpha and beta, in effect, how these parameters affect the proactive resource allocation requests in the contention queue has been modelled for any given scenario from the conference paper "Exploring analytical models to maintain quality-of-service for resource management using a proactive approach in highly mobile environments"

Enabling seamless V2I communications towards developing cooperative automotive applications in VANET systems

Cooperative applications for VANET will require seamless communication between Vehicle to Infrastructure and Vehicle to Vehicle. IEEE 802.11p has been developed to facilitate this effort. However, in order to have seamless communication for these applications, it is necessary to look at handover as vehicles move between Road-side Units. Traditional models of handover used in normal mobile environments are unable to cope with the high velocity of the vehicle and the relatively small area of coverage with regard to vehicular environments. The YComm framework has yielded techniques to calculate the Time Before Vertical Handover and the Network Dwell Time for any given network topology. Furthermore, by knowing these two parameters, it is also possible to improve channel allocation and resource management in network infrastructure such as base-stations, relays, etc. In this article we explain our overall approach by describing the VANET Testbed and show that in Vehicular environments it is necessary to consider a new handover model which is based on a probabilistic rather than a fixed coverage approach. Finally, we show a new performance model for proactive handover which is then compared with traditional approaches

Exploring a new transport protocol for vehicular networks

The Future Internet will be very different from the current Internet. In particular, support for new networks such as vehicular networks, will be a key part of the new environment. Applications running on these networks will require low latency and high bandwidth, which must be provided in a highly mobile environment. The goal of this paper is to look at these issues as they have been addressed in the design and development of the Simple Lightweight Transport Protocol (SLTP) to support vehicular networking. The functions and workings of the protocol are examined in this paper as well as the ecosystem that is needed to provide low latency. A detailed set of preliminary results are presented and compared with a standard TCP implementation. SLTP was also ported to the Roadside Units of a Vehicle Ad-Hoc Network and results are presented for moving data to and from the Roadside Units. This work highlights the need for the Future Internet to place more resources at the edge of the core network to provide support for low latency in vehicular environments

Exploiting resource contention in highly mobile environments and its application to vehicular ad-hoc networks

As network resources are shared between many users, resource management must be a key part of any communication system as it is needed to provide seamless communication and to ensure that applications and servers receive their required Quality-of-Service. However, mobile environments also need to consider handover issues. Furthermore, in a highly mobile environment, traditional reactive approaches to handover are inadequate and thus proactive techniques have been investigated. Recent research in proactive handover techniques, defined two key parameters: Time Before Handover and Network Dwell Time for a mobile node in any given networking topology. Using this approach, it is possible to enhance resource management in common networks using probabilistic mechanisms because it is possible to express contention for resources in terms of: No Contention, Partial Contention and Full Contention. This proactive approach is further enhanced by the use of a contention queue to detect contention between incoming requests and those waiting for service. This paper therefore presents a new methodology to support proactive resource allocation for future networks such as Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks. The proposed approach has been applied to a vehicular testbed and results are presented that show that this approach can improve overall network performance in mobile heterogeneous environments

Building a prototype VANET testbed to explore communication dynamics in highly mobile environments

Applications for VANETs will require seamless communication between vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle. However, this is challenging because this is a highly mobile environment. Therefore, traditional handover techniques are inadequate due to the high velocity of the vehicle and the small coverage radius of Road-side Units. Hence in order to have seamless communication for these applications, a proactive approach needs to be carefully investigated. This requires measurements from a real testbed in order to enhance our understanding of the communication dynamics. This paper is about building and evaluating a prototype VANET network on the Middlesex University Hendon Campus, London to explore these issues. The testbed is being used to investigate better propagation models, road-critical safety applications as well as algorithms for traffic management. In addition, the Network Dwell Time of vehicles travelling in the coverage of the RSUs is measured to explore proactive handover and resource allocation mechanisms

Establishing effective communications in disaster affected areas and artificial intelligence based detection using social media platform

Floods, earthquakes, storm surges and other natural disasters severely affect the communication infrastructure and thus compromise the effectiveness of communications dependent rescue and warning services. In this paper, a user centric approach is proposed to establish communications in disaster affected and communication outage areas. The proposed scheme forms ad hoc clusters to facilitate emergency communications and connect end-users/ User Equipment (UE) to the core network. A novel cluster formation with single and multi-hop communication framework is proposed. The overall throughput in the formed clusters is maximized using convex optimization. In addition, an intelligent system is designed to label different clusters and their localities into affected and non-affected areas. As a proof of concept, the labeling is achieved on flooding dataset where region specific social media information is used in proposed machine learning techniques to classify the disaster-prone areas as flooded or unflooded. The suitable results of the proposed machine learning schemes suggest its use along with proposed clustering techniques to revive communications in disaster affected areas and to classify the impact of disaster for different locations in disaster-prone areas

Exploring efficient seamless handover in VANET systems using network dwell time

Vehicular ad hoc networks are a long-term solution contributing significantly towards intelligent transport systems (ITS) in providing access to critical life-safety applications and services. Although vehicular ad hoc networks are attracting greater commercial interest, current research has not adequately captured the real-world constraints in vehicular ad hoc network handover techniques. Therefore, in order to have the best practice for vehicular ad hoc network services, it is necessary to have seamless connectivity for optimal coverage and ideal channel utilisation. Due to the high velocity of vehicles and smaller coverage distances, there are serious challenges in providing seamless handover from one roadside unit (RSU) to another. Though other research efforts have looked at many issues in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), very few research work have looked at handover issues. Most literature assume that handover does not take a significant time and does not affect the overall VANET operation. In our previous work, we started to investigate these issues. This journal provides a more comprehensive analysis involving the beacon frequency, the size of beacon and the velocity of the vehicle. We used some of the concepts of Y-Comm architecture such as network dwell time (NDT), time before handover (TBH) and exit time (ET) to provide a framework to investigate handover issues. Further simulation studies were used to investigate the relation between beaconing, velocity and the network dwell time. Our results show that there is a need to understand the cumulative effect of beaconing in addition to the probability of successful reception as well as how these probability distributions are affected by the velocity of the vehicle. This provides more insight into how to support life critical applications using proactive handover techniques

Providing ubiquitous communication using handover techniques in VANET systems

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks are a long-term solution contributing significantly towards Intelligent Transport Systems in providing access to critical life-safety applications and services. Although Vehicular Ad hoc Networks are attracting greater commercial interest, current research has not adequately captured the real-world constraints in Vehicular Ad hoc Network handover techniques. This is necessary in order to provide seamless connectivity for optimal coverage and ideal channel utilization. Our previous work highlighted the challenges in providing ubiquitous communication using Road Side Unit in Vehicular Ad hoc Network. We used some of the concepts of the Y-Comm architecture such as Network Dwell Time, Time before Handover and Exit Time to provide a framework to investigate handover issues concentrating on essential parameters such beaconing and velocity of the vehicle. The results clearly showed that the Network Dwell Time was affected by frequency of the beacon and as well as the velocity of the vehicle. In this paper we conducted simulation studies to further examine the relation between these parameters along with different size of beacons. Simulation of VANET systems depends critically upon the calculation of the probability of a successful reception of a beacon or packet. The current formulas used to calculate the successful beacon reception depends on randomness and do not take into account the frequency of the beacon or velocity of the vehicle. This randomness puts a challenge for estimating the Network Dwell Time. This paper shows that these factors are significant and point to the need for a more complete analytical model for estimating the Network Dwell Time