Fifth-generation (5G) networks will be the first generation to benefit from location information that is sufficiently precise to be leveraged in wireless network design and optimization. We argue that location information can aid in addressing several of the key challenges in 5G, complementary to existing and planned technological developments. These challenges include an increase in traffic and number of devices, robustness for mission-critical services, and a reduction in total energy consumption and latency. This article gives a broad overview of the growing research area of location-aware communications across different layers of the protocol stack. We highlight several promising trends, tradeoffs, and pitfalls.

https://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/208857/local_208857.pdf

Location-Aware Communications for 5G Networks: How location information can improve scalability, latency, and robustness of 5G

Large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) services such as healthcare, smart cities, and marine monitoring are pervasive in cyber-physical environments strongly supported by Internet technologies and fog computing. Complex IoT services are increasingly composed of sensors, devices, and compute resources within fog computing infrastructures. The orchestration of such applications can be leveraged to alleviate the difficulties of maintenance and enhance data security and system reliability. However, efficiently dealing with dynamic variations and transient operational behavior is a crucial challenge within the context of choreographing complex services. Furthermore, with the rapid increase of the scale of IoT deployments, the heterogeneity, dynamicity, and uncertainty within fog environments and increased computational complexity further aggravate this challenge. This article gives an overview of the core issues, challenges, and future research directions in fog-enabled orchestration for IoT services. Additionally, it presents early experiences of an orchestration scenario, demonstrating the feasibility and initial results of using a distributed genetic algorithm in this context.

/pdf/fog-orchestration-for-internet-of-things-services-1xgg2wvdbl.pdf

Fog Orchestration for Internet of Things Services

A system for sharing and processing road condition information includes a number of road condition information computer systems within individual vehicles or devices and a virtual road condition information server on a mobile network. The road condition information computer systems are each connected through a peer-to-peer radio, cellular, Wi-Fi, or other similar communications network, and which each operate with a database for displaying road maps, with a database storing average speed data for directions of travel along roadways, and with a location sensor used to determine the location and average speed of the vehicle or device, which are transmitted to other vehicles. The virtual server returns average speed data for road segments, which is displayed on the road maps. The system includes sharing average speed data calculated as well average speed data received from the plurality of vehicles to other vehicles, thereby enhancing the real-time communication of road condition data.

System for transmitting, processing, receiving, and displaying traffic information

A significant challenge in vehicular networks is to efficiently provide heterogeneous media services with the constraints of limited resources, high mobility, opportunistic contact, and service time requirements. In this paper, we study the heterogeneous media provision in peer-to-peer (P2P)-based vehicular networks and develop fully dynamic service schemes with the goals of maximizing the total user-satisfaction and achieving a certain amount of fairness. We first construct a general user-satisfaction model according to the network transmission mechanism, as well as different media delay-satisfaction characteristics. Then, we formulate the media service as an optimization problem and propose a joint content dissemination and cache update scheme. We also provide the exact steps to achieve the optimal solution at equilibrium, given the user-satisfaction function. Furthermore, we extend the proposed service scheme by addressing the fairness problem. Unlike prior works that target at bandwidth or demand fair, we propose a media-aware satisfaction-fairness strategy, which is aware of the characteristic of user-satisfaction and media content and ensures max-min satisfaction-fairness sharing among multiple vehicles. It is worth noting that both schemes are designed in a distributed manner, which is amenable to online implementation for vehicle networks. In addition, we provide extensive simulation results that demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed schemes.

Distributed Media Services in P2P-Based Vehicular Networks

Vehicle localization is a key issue that has recently attracted attention in a wide range of applications. Navigation, vehicle tracking, emergency calling, and location-based services are examples of emerging applications with a great demand for location information. The Global Positioning System (GPS) has been the de facto standard solution for the vehicle-localization problem. Nevertheless, GPS-based localization is inaccurate and unreliable due to GPS' inherent poor performance in vertical positioning and the prevalent horizontal movement, in addition to anomalies caused by line-of-sight occlusions and multipath issues in urban canyons. Although augmenting GPS localization with inertial sensory data has demonstrated significant performance improvements, there remain situations that give rise to degraded localization accuracy-a deficiency that many applications cannot tolerate. In this paper, we propose intervehicle-communication-assisted localization, a localization technique that takes advantage of the emerging vehicle ad hoc networks environments. Communication among vehicles is utilized to compute a relative vehicle location, the integration of which with motion information and GPS location estimates leading to highly accurate vehicle localization. This proposed localization technique is tested in various simulated road-segment scenarios. It is evident from the simulation results that intervehicle communication has the potential to lead to the improvement of the robustness and accuracy of vehicle-location estimation.

Intervehicle-Communication-Assisted Localization

Recent advances in wireless inter-vehicle communication systems enable the establishment of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) and create significant opportunities for the deployment of a wide variety of applications and services to vehicles. In this work, we investigate the problem of developing services that can provide car drivers with time-sensitive information about traffic conditions and roadside facilities. We introduce the vehicular information transfer protocol (VITP), a location- aware, application-layer, communication protocol designed to support a distributed service infrastructure over vehicular ad- hoc networks. We describe the key design concepts of the VITP protocol and infrastructure. We provide an extensive simulation study of VITP performance on large-scale vehicular networks under realistic highway and city traffic conditions. Our results demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of VITP in providing location-aware services over VANETs.

A. Florides

Papers

Location-Aware Services over Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks using Car-to-Car Communication