Automatic Vehicles is a possible future, but it does not mean that we should forget about improving the present day to day life. Most vehicles have Cruise Control, and few have Adaptive Cruise Control, but very few have Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control(CACC) because it's an integration of software and hardware as different companies produce different vehicles it's hard to get on common ground. CACC at the core is communication among vehicles and sharing information; in this thesis, I tried to make it usable in any car with just the software used in a smartphone. As everybody has a phone in their hand with an inbuilt GPS, it is easier to use it directly rather than have a unique mechanical device embedded with a software application. My application gives the estimated speed usable at a particular time based on the other two vehicles, and it keeps changing based on other cars. It does not depend on any external sensors; hence, no environmental change can affect the data give by my vehicle. This application is a guide that could be used in the snow, rain, or hail when even eyes or technology cannot help. Location and speed are something, and using them and providing safety is my thesis all about.

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is considered to be a viable technology for inter- vehicle communications for the purpose of improving road safety and efficiency. The En- hanced Distribution Channel Access (EDCA) mechanism and multichannel operations are introduced to ensure the Quality of Service (QoS). Therefore, it is necessary to create an accurate vehicular network simulator that guarantees the vehicular communications will work as described in the protocols. A comprehensive vehicular network simulator should consider the interaction between mobility models and network protocols. In this dissertation, a novel vehicular network simulation environment, VANET Toolbox, designed using discrete-event system (DES) is presented. The APP layer DES Module of the proposed simulator integrates vehicular mo- bility operations with message generation functions. The MAC layer DES module supports single channel and multichannel EDCA operations. The PHY layer DES module supports bit-level processing. Compared with packet-based simulator such as NS-3, the proposed PHY layer is more realistic and accurate. The EDCA scheme is evaluated and compared with the traditional Carrier-Sensing Mul- tiple Access (CSMA) scheme, with the simulations proving that data with different priorities can coexist in the same channel. The multichannel operation for the EDCA scheme is also analyzed in this dissertation. The multichannel switching operation and coordination may cause packet dropping or increased latency to the communication. The simulations show that with heavy network traffic, multichannel communication performs better than single channel communication. From the perspective of safety-related messages, the multichannel operation is able to isolate the interference from the non-safety messages in order to achieve a better packet delivery rate and latency. On the other hand, the non-safety messages can achieve high throughput with reasonable latency from multichannel communication under heavy load traffic scenario.

Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication provides a flexible and real-time information dissemination mechanism through various applications of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Achieving seamless connectivity through multi-hop vehicular communication with sparse network is a challenging issue. In this paper, we have studied this multi-hop vehicular connectivity in an urban scenario using GPS traces obtained from San Francisco Yellow cabs. Our current work describes a new algorithm for the analysis of topological properties like connectivity and partitions for any kind of vehicular or mobile computing environment. The novel approach uses bitwise manipulation of sparse matrix with an efficient storage technique for determining multi-hop connectivity. The computation mechanism can be further scaled to parallel processing environment. The main contribution of this research is threefold. First, developing an efficient algorithm to quantify multi-hop connectivity with the aid of bitwise manipulation of sparse matrix. Second, investigating the time varying nature of multi-hop vehicular connectivity and dynamic network partitioning of the topology. Third, deriving a mathematical model for calculating message propagation rate in an urban environment.

Electric vehicles (EVs) have emerged to be the future of transportation as the world observes its rising demand and usage across continents. However, currently, one of the biggest bottlenecks of EVs is the battery. Small batteries limit the EVs driving range, while big batteries are expensive and not environmentally friendly. One potential solution to this challenge is the deployment of charging roads, i.e., dynamic wireless charging systems installed under the roads that enable EVs to be charged while driving. In this thesis, we establish a framework using stochastic geometry to study the performance of deploying charging roads in metropolitan cities. We first present the course of actions that a driver may take when driving from a random source to a random destination, and then analyze the distribution of the distance to the nearest charging road and the probability that the trip passes through at least one charging road. These probability distributions assist not only urban planners and policy makers in designing deployment plans of dynamic wireless charging systems, but also drivers and automobile manufacturers in choosing the best driving routes given the road conditions and level of energy of EVs.

Dans ces dernières années, les Systèmes de Transport Intelligents (STI) ont été considérés comme l'un des domaines de recherche les plus émergents en raison de leur rôle prometteur dans l'amélioration de la gestion du trafic et de la sécurité routière. Les applications coopératives de sécurité, étant les plus cruciales, ont gagné beaucoup d'intérêt. L'efficacité de ces applications dépend largement de l'échange efficace de deux principaux types d'informations. L'information de localisation périodique correspondant à l'information de localisation du voisinage et l'information événementielle qui est transmise en multi-sauts et générée lors de la détection d'une situation d'urgence. En raison de la caractéristique à grande échelle des STI, cette information fait l'objet du problème de congestion dans le réseau. L'objectif de cette thèse est d'assurer un contrôle fiable et robuste des informations de sécurité permettant de réduire la congestion du canal tout en tenant en compte des exigences des applications de sécurité. Nous examinons la diffusion de l'information événementielle en proposant une approche a multi-sauts qui a montré une amélioration de la réception de l'information. Cependant, cette approche reste très sensible à la charge de canal résultant de transmissions de l'information de localisation périodiques. D'autre part, la transmission efficace de l'information événementielle repose essentiellement sur la détection précise des événements de sécurité et en conséquence sur la précision de l'information de localisation. Ainsi, nous proposons un mécanisme de contrôle de l'information de localisation afin de fournir une meilleure précision et limiter la charge du canal. Les approches proposées dans cette thèse ont profondément étudié le compromis entre le respect des exigences des applications de sécurité et la gestion efficace de la congestion dans le réseau véhiculaire. / In the last decades, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have been considered as one of the most emerging research area due to their promising role in promoting traffic efficiency and enhancing road safety. ITS cooperative safety applications, being the most vital and critical, have gained a lot of attention. The effectiveness of these applications depends widely on the efficient exchange of two main types of information. The periodic awareness corresponding to the one-hop location information of surrounding environment and the multi-hop event-driven information generated at the detection of a safety situation. Due to the large scale characteristic of ITS, this information is expected to be subject to severe congestion which might impact its reliable reception. The goal of this thesis is to focus on the reliable and robust control of safety-related information by reducing the channel congestion and at the same time taking into account the requirements of safety applications. We address first the event-driven safety information. We proposed a multi-hop policy showed to improve the dissemination of the event-driven information. However, it remains strongly sensitive to the channel load resulting from periodic awareness transmissions. On the other hand, the effective transmission of event-driven information depends primarily on the accurate detection of safety events and accordingly on the accuracy of awareness. Thus, we provide an efficient awareness control mechanism in order to provide better accuracy and limit the channel congestion. The approaches proposed in this thesis have deeply investigated the trade-off between ensuring the requirements of cooperative safety and the efficient management of congestion in vehicular network.

Em sistemas de transporte inteligentes, as redes veiculares têm um papel fundamental. Por meio da comunicação sem fio, veículos irão disseminar conteúdo nessas redes para melhorar a segurança e eficiência no transporte, prover aplicações de entretenimento etc. Beaconing, proposto originalmente para aplicações de segurança, é usado neste estudo como uma das maneiras de disseminação de conteúdo, onde o nó emissor insere uma informação em um quadro de beacon, que é propagado em broadcast. A maioria dos estudos da literatura focam na otimização de desempenho de beaconing e utilizam o método de simulação para validação e avaliação. Esta tese explora estratégias de beaconing com validação e avaliação usando método experimental em ambientes reais para resolver problemas relacionados a aplicações cooperativas de localização e posicionamento de veículos. Para tanto, foi implantado um testbed veicular para realização de testes tradicionais, como o de desempenho sobre os parâmetros de comunicação, mas principalmente de novos protocolos que transmitem informações adicionais nos beacons. Os principais resultados são: i) uma aplicação para inferência da distância entre os veículos por meio do sinal recebido de rádio frequência, ii) localização de pontos de interesse para motoristas e passageiros e por fim, iii) verificação da localização do veículo e disseminação de beacons anonimamente. Desta maneira, este estudo demonstrou, por meio de experimentos em ambientes reais, que estratégias de beacons podem ser aplicadas com sucesso para aplicações que usam cooperação para localização e posicionamento em redes veiculares / Vehicular networks play an important role in intelligent transportation systems. Through wireless communication, vehicles can disseminate information to improve transportation safety and efficiency, and provide entertainment applications. Beaconing, first proposed for safety applications, is used in this study as one of the ways to disseminate information, in which the source node adds information to the beacon frame, which is finally propagated in broadcast. Most studies in the literature focus on beaconing performance and optimization using simulations. This thesis explores beaconing strategies, applying experimental methods to validate and evaluate beaconing in real environments, solving problems related to cooperative location applications and vehicles positioning. A vehicular network testbed was developed to perform traditional tests, such as the performance of the communication parameters and to specifically test novel protocols that transmit additional information in the beacons. The key contributions are: i) an application to infer the distance between vehicles via the radio frequency signal received; ii) location of points of interest for drivers and passengers; and iii) location verification of vehicle and anonymous beacon broadcast. In brief, this study demonstrated, through experiments in real environments, that beacon strategies can be successfully applied to problems of location and positioning in vehicular networks

在vehicular network中應用Peer to peer (p2p)是目前尚在研究的一項領域。不同於一般wired network的環境，vehicular network環境中變動性相當高，且車輛移動速度快，車輛間無法長時間維持連線，所以若要在vehicular network上分享檔案資源，會遭遇到許多問題，像是如何在網路上有效率地搜尋所需要的檔案、相距甚遠的車輛如何分享彼此的資源、在有限的頻寬中如何發揮最大的分享效益，皆是十分重要的課題。本研究提出Urban Multi Layered Chord (UML-Chord)架構，在市區環境的vehicular network中，引入infrastructure-based的架構，以解決ad-hoc環境中只能靠車輛機會相遇時交換訊息，僅能做範圍內搜尋的缺點。另外我們使用multi-layered chord來管理網路上分享的檔案資源，此種結構化的p2p架構可以有比較好的搜尋效率。在檔案傳輸上，我們加入交通號誌的狀況後，讓車輛間連線預估時間(connection lifetime)更加精確，得以選出最適合的節點下載檔案，增加檔案的傳輸效率，提昇整體p2p應用的效能。 / Peer-to-peer (p2p) applications on vehicular network is a significant research topic today .Vehicular network is different from traditional wired network environment in some characteristics. Topology is very dynamic and vehicles driving in high speed, the connection between vehicles can’t maintain in a long time in vehicular network. If we want to share file resources on vehicular network, there are some problems to confronted, like the efficiency of query operations, sharing files with distance vehicles and fully utilizing the limited bandwidth. Our paper proposes an Urban Multi-layered Chord (UML-Chord) method in urban Vehicular network. Introducing infrastructure based architecture to deal with the problem that cars can exchange their files only when they meet each other in ad-hoc mode. In addition, we use multi layered chord to manage file resources which should be shared on Internet. This kind of structured p2p architecture has better efficiency in searching files. For file transfer part, we take stop light into account. We modify connection lifetime, let it be used in choosing appropriated download peers, enhancing the efficiency of p2p application.

By equipping vehicles with the on-board wireless facility, the newly emerged vehicular networking targets to provision the broadband serves to vehicles. As such, a variety of novel and exciting applications can be provided to vehicular users to enhance their road safety and travel comfort, and finally raise a complete change to their on-road life. As the content distribution and media/video streaming, such as Youtube, Netflix, nowadays have become the most popular Internet applications, to enable the efficient content distribution and audio/video streaming services is thus of the paramount importance to the success of the vehicular networking. This, however, is fraught with fundamental challenges due to the distinguished natures of vehicular networking. On one hand, the vehicular communication is challenged by the spotty and volatile wireless connections caused by the high mobility of vehicles. This makes the download performance of connections very unstable and dramatically change over time, which directly threats to the on-top media applications. On the other hand, a vehicular network typically involves an extremely large-scale node population (e.g., hundreds or thousandths of vehicles in a region) with intense spatial and temporal variations across the network geometry at different times. This dictates any designs to be scalable and fully distributed which should not only be resilient to the network dynamics, but also provide the guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS) to users. The purpose of this dissertation is to address the challenges of the vehicular networking imposed by its intrinsic dynamic and large-scale natures, and build the efficient, scalable and, more importantly, practical systems to enable the cost-effective and QoS guaranteed content distribution and media streaming services to vehicular users. Note that to effective- ly deliver the content from the remote Internet to in-motion vehicles, it typically involves three parts as: 1.) an infrastructure grid of gateways which behave as the data depots or injection points of Internet contents and services to vehicles, 2.) protocol at gateways which schedules the bandwidth resource at gateways and coordinates the parallel transmissions to different vehicles, and 3.) the end-system control mechanism at receivers which adapts the receiver’s content download/playback strategy based on the available network throughput to provide users with the desired service experience. With above three parts in mind, the entire research work in this dissertation casts a systematic view to address each part in one topic with: 1.) design of large-scale cost-effective content distribution infrastructure, 2.) MAC (media access control) performance evaluation and channel time scheduling, and 3.) receiver adaptation and adaptive playout in dynamic download environment. In specific, in the first topic, we propose a practical solution to form a large-scale and cost-effective content distribution infrastructure in the city. We argue that a large-scale infrastructure with the dedicated resources, including storage, computing and communication capacity, is necessary for the vehicular network to become an alternative of 3G/4G cellular network as the dominating approach of ubiquitous content distribution and data services to vehicles. On addressing this issue, we propose a fully distributed scheme to form a large-scale infrastructure by the contributions of individual entities in the city, such as grocery stores, movie theaters, etc. That is to say, the installation and maintenance costs are shared by many individuals. In this topic, we explain the design rationale on how to motivate individuals to contribute, and specify the detailed design of the system, which is embodied with distributed protocols and performance evaluation. The second topic investigates on the MAC throughput performance of the vehicle-to- infrastructure (V2I) communications when vehicles drive through RSUs, namely drive-thru Internet. Note that with a large-scale population of fast-motion nodes contending the chan- nel for transmissions, the MAC performance determines the achievable nodal throughput and is crucial to the on-top applications. In this topic, using a simple yet accurate Marko- vian model, we first show the impacts of mobility (characterized by node velocity and moving directions) on the nodal and system throughput performance, respectively. Based on this analysis, we then propose three enhancement schemes to timely adjust the MAC parameters in tune with the vehicle mobility to achieve the maximal the system throughput. The last topic investigates on the end-system design to deliver the user desired media streaming services in the vehicular environment. In specific, the vehicular communications are notoriously known for the intermittent connectivity and dramatically varying throughput. Video streaming on top of vehicular networks therefore inevitably suffers from the severe network dynamics, resulting in the frequent jerkiness or even freezing video playback. To address this issue, an analytical model is first developed to unveil the impacts of network dynamics on the resultant video performance to users in terms of video start-up delay and smoothness of playback. Based on the analysis, the adaptive playout buffer mechanism is developed to adapt the video playback strategy at receivers towards the user-defined video quality. The proposals developed in the three topics are validated with the extensive and high fidelity simulations. We believe that our analysis developed in the dissertation can provide insightful lights on understanding the fundamental performance of the vehicular content distribution networks from the aspects of session-level download performance in urban vehicular networks (topic 1), MAC throughput performance (topic 2), and user perceived media quality (topic 3). The protocols developed in the three topics, respectively, offer practical and efficient solutions to build and optimize the vehicular content distribution networks.

With the advent of mobile Internet the amount of time people spend with multimedia applications in the mobile environment is surging and demand for high quality multimedia data over the Internet in the mobile environment is growing rapidly. However the mobile environment is significantly more unfriendly than the wired environment for multimedia applications in many ways. Network resources are limited and the condition is harder to predict. Also multimedia applications are generally delay intolerant and bandwidth demanding, and with users moving, their demand could be much more dynamic and harder to anticipate. Due to such reasons many existing mobile multimedia applications show unsatisfactory performance in the mobile environment. We target three multimedia content delivery applications and optimize with limited and unpredictable network conditions typical in the mobile Internet environment. Vehicular networks have emerged from the strong desire to communicate on the move. We explore the potential of supporting high-bandwidth applications such as video streaming in vehicular networks. Challenges include limited and expensive cellular network, etc. Internet video conferencing has become popular over the past few years, but supporting high-quality large video conferences at a low cost remains a significant challenge due to stringent performance requirements, limited and heterogeneous client. We develop a simple yet effective Valiant multicast routing to select application-layer routes and adapt streaming rates according to dynamically changing network condition in a swift and lightweight way enough to be implemented on mobile devices. Bitrate adaptive video streaming is rapidly gaining popularity. However recent measurements show weaknesses in bitrate selection strategies implemented in today's streaming players especially in the mobile environment. We propose a novel rate adaptation scheme that classifies the network condition into stable and unstable periods and optimizes video quality with different strategies based on the classification. / text

By equipping vehicles with the on-board wireless facility, the newly emerged vehicular networking targets to provision the broadband serves to vehicles. As such, a variety of novel and exciting applications can be provided to vehicular users to enhance their road safety and travel comfort, and finally raise a complete change to their on-road life. As the content distribution and media/video streaming, such as Youtube, Netflix, nowadays have become the most popular Internet applications, to enable the efficient content distribution and audio/video streaming services is thus of the paramount importance to the success of the vehicular networking. This, however, is fraught with fundamental challenges due to the distinguished natures of vehicular networking. On one hand, the vehicular communication is challenged by the spotty and volatile wireless connections caused by the high mobility of vehicles. This makes the download performance of connections very unstable and dramatically change over time, which directly threats to the on-top media applications. On the other hand, a vehicular network typically involves an extremely large-scale node population (e.g., hundreds or thousandths of vehicles in a region) with intense spatial and temporal variations across the network geometry at different times. This dictates any designs to be scalable and fully distributed which should not only be resilient to the network dynamics, but also provide the guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS) to users. The purpose of this dissertation is to address the challenges of the vehicular networking imposed by its intrinsic dynamic and large-scale natures, and build the efficient, scalable and, more importantly, practical systems to enable the cost-effective and QoS guaranteed content distribution and media streaming services to vehicular users. Note that to effective- ly deliver the content from the remote Internet to in-motion vehicles, it typically involves three parts as: 1.) an infrastructure grid of gateways which behave as the data depots or injection points of Internet contents and services to vehicles, 2.) protocol at gateways which schedules the bandwidth resource at gateways and coordinates the parallel transmissions to different vehicles, and 3.) the end-system control mechanism at receivers which adapts the receiver’s content download/playback strategy based on the available network throughput to provide users with the desired service experience. With above three parts in mind, the entire research work in this dissertation casts a systematic view to address each part in one topic with: 1.) design of large-scale cost-effective content distribution infrastructure, 2.) MAC (media access control) performance evaluation and channel time scheduling, and 3.) receiver adaptation and adaptive playout in dynamic download environment. In specific, in the first topic, we propose a practical solution to form a large-scale and cost-effective content distribution infrastructure in the city. We argue that a large-scale infrastructure with the dedicated resources, including storage, computing and communication capacity, is necessary for the vehicular network to become an alternative of 3G/4G cellular network as the dominating approach of ubiquitous content distribution and data services to vehicles. On addressing this issue, we propose a fully distributed scheme to form a large-scale infrastructure by the contributions of individual entities in the city, such as grocery stores, movie theaters, etc. That is to say, the installation and maintenance costs are shared by many individuals. In this topic, we explain the design rationale on how to motivate individuals to contribute, and specify the detailed design of the system, which is embodied with distributed protocols and performance evaluation. The second topic investigates on the MAC throughput performance of the vehicle-to- infrastructure (V2I) communications when vehicles drive through RSUs, namely drive-thru Internet. Note that with a large-scale population of fast-motion nodes contending the chan- nel for transmissions, the MAC performance determines the achievable nodal throughput and is crucial to the on-top applications. In this topic, using a simple yet accurate Marko- vian model, we first show the impacts of mobility (characterized by node velocity and moving directions) on the nodal and system throughput performance, respectively. Based on this analysis, we then propose three enhancement schemes to timely adjust the MAC parameters in tune with the vehicle mobility to achieve the maximal the system throughput. The last topic investigates on the end-system design to deliver the user desired media streaming services in the vehicular environment. In specific, the vehicular communications are notoriously known for the intermittent connectivity and dramatically varying throughput. Video streaming on top of vehicular networks therefore inevitably suffers from the severe network dynamics, resulting in the frequent jerkiness or even freezing video playback. To address this issue, an analytical model is first developed to unveil the impacts of network dynamics on the resultant video performance to users in terms of video start-up delay and smoothness of playback. Based on the analysis, the adaptive playout buffer mechanism is developed to adapt the video playback strategy at receivers towards the user-defined video quality. The proposals developed in the three topics are validated with the extensive and high fidelity simulations. We believe that our analysis developed in the dissertation can provide insightful lights on understanding the fundamental performance of the vehicular content distribution networks from the aspects of session-level download performance in urban vehicular networks (topic 1), MAC throughput performance (topic 2), and user perceived media quality (topic 3). The protocols developed in the three topics, respectively, offer practical and efficient solutions to build and optimize the vehicular content distribution networks.