Traditionally, the vehicle has been the extension of the man's ambulatory system, docile to the driver's commands. Recent advances in communications, controls and embedded systems have changed this model, paving the way to the Intelligent Vehicle Grid. The car is now a formidable sensor platform, absorbing information from the environment (and from other cars) and feeding it to drivers and infrastructure to assist in safe navigation, pollution control and traffic management. The next step in this evolution is just around the corner: the Internet of Autonomous Vehicles. Pioneered by the Google car, the Internet of Vehicles will be a distributed transport fabric capable to make its own decisions about driving customers to their destinations. Like other important instantiations of the Internet of Things (e.g., the smart building), the Internet of Vehicles will have communications, storage, intelligence, and learning capabilities to anticipate the customers' intentions. The concept that will help transition to the Internet of Vehicles is the Vehicular Cloud, the equivalent of Internet cloud for vehicles, providing all the services required by the autonomous vehicles. In this article, we discuss the evolution from Intelligent Vehicle Grid to Autonomous, Internet-connected Vehicles, and Vehicular Cloud.

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Internet of vehicles: From intelligent grid to autonomous cars and vehicular clouds

With the rapid development of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), vehicular communication networks have been widely studied in recent years. Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) can provide efficient real-time information exchange among vehicles without the need of pervasive roadside communication infrastructure. Although mobile cellular networks are capable of providing wide coverage for vehicular users, the requirements of services that require stringent real-time safety cannot always be guaranteed by cellular networks. Therefore, the Heterogeneous Vehicular NETwork (HetVNET), which integrates cellular networks with DSRC, is a potential solution for meeting the communication requirements of the ITS. Although there are a plethora of reported studies on either DSRC or cellular networks, joint research of these two areas is still at its infancy. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on recent wireless networks techniques applied to HetVNETs. Firstly, the requirements and use cases of safety and non-safety services are summarized and compared. Consequently, a HetVNET framework that utilizes a variety of wireless networking techniques is presented, followed by the descriptions of various applications for some typical scenarios. Building such HetVNETs requires a deep understanding of heterogeneity and its associated challenges. Thus, major challenges and solutions that are related to both the Medium Access Control (MAC) and network layers in HetVNETs are studied and discussed in detail. Finally, we outline open issues that help to identify new research directions in HetVNETs.

Heterogeneous Vehicular Networking: A Survey on Architecture, Challenges, and Solutions

A survey of urban vehicular sensing platforms

Driven by both safety concerns and commercial interests, one of the key services offered by vehicular networks is popular content distribution (PCD). The fundamental challenges to achieve high speed content downloading come from the highly dynamic topology of vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) and the lossy nature of the vehicular wireless communications. In this paper, we introduce CodeOn, a novel push-based PCD scheme where contents are actively broadcasted to vehicles from road side access points and further distributed among vehicles using a cooperative VANET. In CodeOn, we employ a recent technique, symbol level network coding (SLNC) to combat the lossy wireless transmissions. Through exploiting symbol level diversity, SLNC is robust to transmission errors and encourages more aggressive concurrent transmissions. In order to fully enjoy the benefits of SLNC, we propose a suite of techniques to maximize the downloading rate, including a prioritized and localized relay selection mechanism where the selection criteria is based on the usefulness of vehicles' possessed contents, and a lightweight medium access protocol that naturally exploits the abundant concurrent transmission opportunities. We also propose additional mechanisms to reduce the protocol overhead without sacrificing the performance. Extensive simulation results show that, under a wide range of scenarios, CodeOn significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art PCD scheme based on network coding.

CodeOn: Cooperative Popular Content Distribution for Vehicular Networks using Symbol Level Network Coding

A survey on internet of vehicles: Applications, security issues & solutions

Content sharing using cooperative peer-to-peer model has become increasingly more popular in a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). The small transmission window from a vehicle to an access point (AP), high mobility of vehicles, and intermittent and short-lived connectivity to an AP provide incentives for vehicles to cooperate with one another to obtain information from the Internet. These characteristics of VANETs naturally stipulate the use of cooperative peer-to-peer paradigm and motivate related content sharing application such as CarTorrent. Building upon previous research on SPAWN [6, 1], we have implemented CarTorrent and deployed it on a real VANET. We have run extensive field tests to affirm the feasibility of the peer-to-peer file sharing application tailored to VANET. To the best of our knowledge, the deployment of such a content sharing application on a real vehicular ad hoc testbed is the first of its kind.

https://www.cise.ufl.edu/%7Ehelmy/cis6930-09/cartorrent.pdf

First Experience with CarTorrent in a Real Vehicular Ad Hoc Network Testbed

Besides safe navigation (e.g., warning of approaching vehicles), car to car communications will enable a host of new applications, ranging from offlce-on-the-wheel support to entertainment. One of the most promising applications is content distribution among drivers such as multi-media files and software updates. Content distribution in vehicular networks is a challenge due to network dynamics and high mobility, yet network coding was shown to efficiently handle such dynamics and to considerably enhance performance. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of implementation issues of network coding in vehicular networks. To this end, we consider general resource constraints (e.g., CPU, disk, memory) besides bandwidth, that are likely to impact the encoding and storage management operations required by network coding. We develop an abstract model of the network coding procedures and implement it in the wireless network simulator to evaluate the impact of limited resources. We then propose schemes that considerably improve the use of such resources. Our model and extensive simulation results show that network coding parameters must be carefully configured by taking resource constraints into account.

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Content Distribution in VANETs Using Network Coding: The Effect of Disk I/O and Processing O/H

The advancements of diverse radio technologies and emerging applications have spawned increasing heterogeneity in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). But the collaborative nature of communications and operations often requires that these heterogeneous MANETs to be interoperable. Nonetheless, the existing interconnection protocols designed for the Internet (namely inter-domain routing protocol such as BGP) are not adequate for handling the unique challenges in MANETs. In this paper, we present a novel Inter-MANET Routing protocol called InterMR that can handle the heterogeneity and dynamics of MANETs. Our first contribution is an Inter-MANET address scheme based on a variety of node attributes (e.g., symbolic name, property, etc.); this allows dynamic merging/split of network topologies without a separate Name Server. Our second contribution is to provide a seamless routing mechanism across heterogeneous MANETs without modifying the internal routing mechanisms in each MANET. The proposed scheme can transparently adapt to topological changes due to node mobility in MANETs by dynamically assigning the gateway functionalities. We show, by packet-level simulation, that the performance of InterMR can be improved by up to 112% by adaptive gateway assignment functionalities. We also show that InterMR is scalable with only modest overhead by analysis.

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InterMR: Inter-MANET routing in heterogeneous MANETs

Mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have recently got in the limelight of the research community that is striving to build efficient and effective mobile content addressable networks. Along this line of research, we propose a new peer-to-peer file sharing protocol suited to mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). The main ingredients of our protocol are network coding and mobility assisted data propagation, i.e., single-hop communication. We argue that network coding in combination with single-hop communication allows P2P file sharing systems in MANET to operate in a more efficient manner and helps the systems to deal with typical MANET issues such as dynamic topology and intermittent connectivity as well as various other issues that have been disregarded in previous MANET P2P researches such as addressing, node/user density, non-cooperativeness, and unreliable channel. Via simulation, we show that our P2P protocol based on network coding and single-hop communication allows shorter file downloading delays compared to an existing MANET P2P protocol.

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Efficient peer-to-peer file sharing using network coding in MANET

Remote medical monitoring with medical sensors and wireless communications has recently gained attention for the potential savings and improved quality in patient health-care. Currently, many mobile wireless medical infrastructures connect to the Internet in a point-to-point fashion, such as the cellular network. However, our research investigates new models for remote patient care that exploit P2P networking among patients and healthcare providers (nurses, doctors, emergency personnel). In this paper, we identify several medical applications based on P2P health networking focusing on two specific scenarios where nurses and patients are both equipped with Bluetooth devices. Nurses opportunistically collect, share and upload data in a P2P fashion. During an emergency, the nearest nurse is alerted via Bluetooth enhanced inquiry response mechanism. The simulation and test-bed experimentation demonstrate that Bluetooth P2P networking is both feasible and cost-effective in remote medical monitoring.

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Seung-Hoon Lee

Papers

First Experience with CarTorrent in a Real Vehicular Ad Hoc Network Testbed

Content Distribution in VANETs Using Network Coding: The Effect of Disk I/O and Processing O/H

InterMR: Inter-MANET routing in heterogeneous MANETs

Efficient peer-to-peer file sharing using network coding in MANET

Opportunistic medical monitoring using bluetooth P2P networks