We propose to use Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) as the infrastructure for an urban cyber-physical system for gathering up-to-date data about a city, like traffic conditions or environmental parameters. In this context, it is critical to design a data collection protocol that enables retrieving the data from the vehicles in almost real-time in an efficient way for urban scenarios.
We propose Back off-based Per-hop Forwarding (BPF), a broadcast-based receiver-oriented protocol that uses the destination location information to select the forwarding order among the nodes receiving the packet. BFP does not require nodes to exchange periodic messages with their neighbors communicating their locations to keep a low management message overhead. It uses geographic information about the final destination node in the header of each data packet to route it in a hop-by-hop basis. It takes advantage of redundant forwarding to increase packet delivery to a destination, what is more critical in an urban scenario than in a highway, where the road topology does not represent a challenge for forwarding.
We evaluate the performance of the BPF protocol using ns-3 and a Manhattan grid topology and compare it with well-known broadcast suppression techniques. Our results show that BPF achieves significantly higher packet delivery rates at a reduced redundancy cost.
Vehicles provide an ideal platform for urban sensing applications, as they can be equipped with all kinds of sensing devices that can continuously monitor the environment around the travelling vehicle. In this work we are particularly concerned with the use of vehicles as building blocks of a multimedia mobile sensor system able to capture camera snapshots of the streets to support traffic monitoring and urban surveillance tasks. However, cameras are high data-rate sensors while wireless infrastructures used for vehicular communications may face performance constraints. Thus, data redundancy m…
Compressive sensing (CS) has been widely used for the data gathering in wireless sensor networks for the purpose of reducing the communication overhead recent years. In this paper, we first show that with simple modification, 1-bit compressive sensing can also been used for the data gathering in wireless sensor networks to further reduce the communication overhead. We also propose a novel blind 1-bit CS reconstruction algorithm which outperforms other state of the art blind 1-bit CS reconstruction algorithms. Experimental results on real sensor datasets demonstrate the efficiency of our method…
This research aims at using vehicular ad-hoc networks as infra-structure for an urban cyber-physical system in order to gather data about a city. In this scenario, all nodes are data sources and there is a gateway as ultimate destination for all packets. Because of the volatility of the network connections and uncertainty of actual node placement, we argue that a broadcast-based protocol is the most adequate solution, despite the high overhead. The Urban Data Collector (UDC) protocol has been proposed which uses a distributed election of the forwarding node among the nodes receiving the packet…
The timely sharing of raw sensing information in the vehicular networks (VNETs) is essential to safety. In order to improve the freshness of sensing information, joint scheduling of multi-dimensional resources such as communication and computation is required. However, the complex relevance among multi-dimensional resources is still unclear, and it is difficult to achieve efficient resource utilization. In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis for a novel metric Age of Information (AoI) on a communication and computation assisted spatial-temporal model. An uplink VNETs scenario where R…
Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) as the basic infrastructure can facilitate applications and services of connected vehicles (CVs). Cognitive radio (CR) technology is an effective supplement and enhancement for VANETs. It can reduce the impact of deficiency of spectrum resource in VANETs. Although CR-VANETs can utilize the unused licensed spectrum effectively, the distributed nature of CR-VANETs may open a door for different attacks, such as spectrum sensing data falsification attack. In this paper, we propose a joint RSU and vehicle-based light-weighted cloud for CR-VANETs. Based on this clo…
In this paper, the problem of joint communication and sensing is studied in the context of terahertz (THz) vehicular networks. In the studied model, a set of service provider vehicles (SPVs) provide either communication service or sensing service to target vehicles, where it is essential to determine 1) the service mode (i.e., providing either communication or sensing service) for each SPV and 2) the subset of target vehicles that each SPV will serve. The problem is formulated as an optimization problem aiming to maximize the sum of the data rates of the communication target vehicles, while sa…
Recent advances in the integration of vehicular sensor network (VSN) technology, and crowd sensing leveraging pervasive sensors called onboard units (OBUs), like smartphones and radio frequency IDentifications to provide sensing services, have attracted increasing attention from both industry and academy. Nowadays, existing vehicular sensing applications lack good mechanisms to improve the maximum achievable throughput and minimizing service time of participating sensing OBUs in vehicular sensor networks. To fill these gaps, in this paper, first, we introduce real imperfect link states to the …
Due to spectrum scarcity and increasing wireless capacity demands, terahertz (THz) communications at 0.1-10THz and the corresponding spectrum characterization have emerged to meet diverse service requirements in future 5G and 6G wireless systems. However, conventional compressed sensing techniques to reconstruct the original wideband spectrum with under-sampled measurements become inefficient as local spectral correlation is deliberately omitted. Recent works extend communication methods with deep learning-based algorithms but lack strong ties to THz channel properties. This paper introduces n…
To enlarge the perception range and reliability of individual autonomous vehicles, cooperative perception has been received much attention. However, considering the high volume of shared messages, limited bandwidth and computation resources in vehicular networks become bottlenecks. In this paper, we investigate how to balance the volume of shared messages and constrained resources in fog-based vehicular networks. To this end, we first characterize sum satisfaction of cooperative perception taking account of its spatial-temporal value and latency performance. Next, the sensing block message, co…
Gathering data in an energy efficient manner in wireless sensor networks is an important design challenge. In wireless sensor networks, the readings of sensors always exhibit intra-temporal and inter-spatial correlations. Therefore, in this letter, we use low rank matrix completion theory to explore the inter-spatial correlation and use compressive sensing theory to take advantage of intra-temporal correlation. Our method, dubbed MCCS, can significantly reduce the amount of data that each sensor must send through network and to the sink, thus prolong the lifetime of the whole networks. Experim…
One of the most challenging fields in vehicular communications has been the experimental assessment of protocols and novel technologies. Researchers usually tend to simulate vehicular scenarios and/or partially validate new contributions in the area by using constrained testbeds and carrying out minor tests. In this line, the present work reviews the issues that pioneers in the area of vehicular communications and, in general, in telematics, have to deal with if they want to perform a good evaluation campaign by real testing. The key needs for a good experimental evaluation is the use of prope…
Fixed edge processing has become a key feature of 5G networks, while playing a key role in reducing latency, improving energy efficiency and introducing flexible compute resource utilization on-demand with added cost savings. Autonomous vehicles are expected to possess significantly more on-board processing capabilities and with improved connectivity. Vehicles continue to be used for a fraction of the day, and as such there is a potential to increase processing capacity by utilizing these resources while vehicles are in short-term and long-term car parks, in roads and at road intersections. Su…
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project released the cellular vehicular-to-everything (C-V2X) specifications as part of the LTE framework in Release 14. C-V2X is the alternative to dedicated short range communications and both are specifically designed for V2X control signaling. C-V2X extends the device-to-device specifications by adding two more modes of operation targeting the vehicular environment in coverage and out of coverage of LTE base stations. Vehicle-to-vehicle communications (V2V) is established with Mode 4, where the devices schedule their transmissions in a distributed way employi…
Now a days Many car manufacturers are planning to install wireless connectivity equipment in their vehicles to enable communications with "roadside base station" and also between vehicles, for the purposes of safety, driving assistance, and entertainment. One distinct feature is that vehicles are highly mobile, with speed up to 30 m/s, though their mobility patterns are more predictable than those of nodes in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) due to the constraints imposed by road, speed limits, and commuting habits. Therefore, these networks require specific solutions and identify a novel resear…
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) operating in the license-free spectrum suffer from uncontrolled interference as those spectrum bands become increasingly crowded. The emerging cognitive radio sensor networks (CRSNs) provide a promising solution to address this challenge by enabling sensor nodes to opportunistically access licensed channels. However, since sensor nodes have to consume considerable energy to support CR functionalities, such as channel sensing and switching, the opportunistic channel accessing should be carefully devised for improving the energy efficiency in CRSN. To this end, we…
This paper studies how the interference of vehicular communications affects the safety of vehicles in a vehicular ad hoc network. Different signal propagation models with and without carrier sensing are considered for the dissemination of periodic safety messages. Then, by employing the results for different packet success probability of the vehicles, we compare the expected collision probability of vehicles for different signal fading models. Our results show how the collision probabilities of vehicles in the network vary with respect to different models and designs.
Autonomous vehicles can combine their own data with that of other vehicles to enhance their perceptive ability, and thus improve detection accuracy and driving safety. Data sharing among autonomous vehicles, however, is a challenging problem due to the sheer volume of data generated by various types of sensors on the vehicles. In this paper, we propose a low-latency, high-level (L3) data sharing protocol for connected and autonomous vehicular networks. Based on the L3 protocol, sensing results generated by individual vehicles will be broadcasted simultaneously within a limited sensing zone. Th…
Capacity of vehicular networks with infrastructure support is both an interesting and challenging problem as the capacity is determined by the inter-play of multiple factors including vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, density and mobility of vehicles, and cooperation among vehicles and infrastructure. In this paper, we consider a typical delay-tolerant application scenario with a subset of vehicles, termed Vehicles of Interest (VoIs), having download requests. Each VoI downloads a distinct large-size file from the Internet and other vehicl…
With onboard operating systems becoming increasingly common in vehicles, the real-time broadband infotainment and Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) service applications in fast-motion vehicles become ever demanding, which are highly expected to significantly improve the efficiency and safety of our daily on-road lives. The emerging ITS and vehicular applications, e.g., trip planning, however, require substantial efforts on the real-time pervasive information collection and big data processing so as to provide quick decision making and feedbacks to the fast moving vehicles, which thus imp…
In this work we study the problem of collecting protected data in ad-hoc sensor network using a mobile entity called MULE. The objective is to increase information survivability in the network. Sensors from all over the network, route their sensing data through a data gathering tree, towards a particular node, called the $sink$. In case of a failed sensor, all the aggregated data from the sensor and from its children is lost. In order to retrieve the lost data, the MULE is required to travel among all the children of the failed sensor and to re-collect the data. There is a cost to travel betwe…
5G applications have become increasingly popular in recent years as the spread of fifth-generation (5G) network deployment has grown. For vehicular networks, mmWave band signals have been well studied and used for communication and sensing. In this work, we propose a new dynamic ray tracing algorithm that exploits spatial and temporal coherence. We evaluate the performance by comparing the results on typical vehicular communication scenarios with GEMV^2, which uses a combination of deterministic and stochastic models, and WinProp, which utilizes the deterministic model for simulations with giv…
With the emergence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and wireless embedded sensing devices into modern vehicles, Intelligent Transport System (ITS) becomes a reality and an indispensable component of smart cities. The purpose of ITS is to improve road safety and traffic efficiency as well as offering infotainments services. In fact, warning drivers in the right time about dangerous situations on the road and providing them with prior information about traffic will undoubtedly leads to enhance driver's safety and reduce traffic congestion. Technically speaking, ITS is based on…
University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）
Unmanned aerial base stations (UABSs) can be deployed in vehicular wireless networks to support applications such as extended sensing via vehicle-to-everything (V2X) services. A key problem in such systems is designing algorithms that can efficiently optimize the trajectory of the UABS in order to maximize coverage. In existing solutions, such optimization is carried out from scratch for any new traffic configuration, often by means of conventional reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we propose the use of continual meta-RL as a means to transfer information from previously experienced …
Vehicular sensor network (VSN) is an emerging technology, which combines wireless communication offered by vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) with sensing devices installed in vehicles. VSN creates a huge opportunity to extend the road-side sensor infrastructure of existing traffic control systems. The efficient use of the wireless communication medium is one of the basic issues in VSN applications development. This paper introduces a novel method of selective data collection for traffic control applications, which provides a significant reduction in data amounts transmitted through VSN. The un…
Integrating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) into future Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) allows to exploit their unique mobility potentials for improving the performance of services such as near-field parcel delivery, dynamic network provisioning, and aerial sensing. In order to provide a controllable environment for the methodological performance analysis, simulation frameworks need to support ground- and aerial-based mobility as well as the involved communication technologies. In this paper, we present the open source Lightweight ICT-centric Mobility Simulation (LIMoSim) framework f…
Vehicular Sensor Network (VSN) is emerging as a new solution for monitoring urban environments such as Intelligent Transportation Systems and air pollution. One of the crucial factors that determine the service quality of urban monitoring applications is the delivery delay of sensing data packets in the VSN. In this paper, we study the problem of routing data packets with minimum delay in the VSN, by exploiting i) vehicle traffic statistics, ii) anycast routing and iii) knowledge of future trajectories of vehicles such as buses. We first introduce a novel road network graph model that incorpor…
In WSN, each sensor is responsible for sensing environmental conditions and sending them to the one or more base stations. Battery-operated sensors are severely constrained by the amount of energy that can be spend for transmitting these sensed data. However, aggregation of data (including removal of redundant data) at intermediate sensors and forwarding of aggregate data reduce overall energy consumptions in WSN. In general, data gathering refers to the process of periodic collection of sensed data from various sensors to one or more base stations (BS). Energy efficient data gathering schedul…
Data sensing and gathering is an essential task for various information-driven services in smart cities. On the one hand, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors can be deployed at certain fixed locations to capture data reliably but suffer from limited sensing coverage. On the other hand, data can also be gathered dynamically through crowdsensing contributed by voluntary users but suffer from its unreliability and the lack of incentives for users' contributions. In this paper, we explore an integrated paradigm called "hybrid sensing" that harnesses both IoT-sensing and crowdsensing in a complementar…
Accurate vehicular sensing is a basic and important operation in autonomous driving. Unfortunately, the existing techniques have their own limitations. For instance, the communication-based approach (e.g., transmission of GPS information) has high latency and low reliability while the reflection-based approach (e.g., RADAR) is incapable of detecting hidden vehicles (HVs) without line-of-sight. This is arguably the reason behind some recent fatal accidents involving autonomous vehicles. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel HV-sensing technology that exploits multi-path transmissio…
This paper advocates the use of the emerging distributed compressive sensing (DCS) paradigm in order to deploy energy harvesting (EH) wireless sensor networks (WSN) with practical network lifetime and data gathering rates that are substantially higher than the state-of-the-art. In particular, we argue that there are two fundamental mechanisms in an EH WSN: i) the energy diversity associated with the EH process that entails that the harvested energy can vary from sensor node to sensor node, and ii) the sensing diversity associated with the DCS process that entails that the energy consumption ca…
