Abstract
Smart transportation networks, featured by high mobility and intermittent connectivity, are facing critical challenges in data delivery especially when the network is sparse and with less or no support from any infrastructure, such as in disaster and military environments. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), due to their flexible mobility, can be envisioned to enhance the connectivity of ground vehicular networks. In this paper, incorporating UAVs into vehicular networks, a novel data delivery scheme, named UAV-assisted data delivery (UADD), is proposed for smart transportation networks. We introduce a novel concept called “opportunistic virtual intersections”, at which UAVs can communicate with ground vehicles, and assist to deliver data packets. Specifically, at an opportunistic virtual intersection, UAVs may act as a relay, which can relay data packets between two vehicles as an intermediate hop, or deliver data packets in a store-carry-and-forward manner. The data forwarding rules are devised based on expected delivery delay and delivery probability of data packets. The performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed UAV-assisted data delivery scheme can achieve a significant improvement of data delivery performance in terms of delivery delay and delivery ratio.
Highlights
Vehicular networks have been envisioned to be critical to the generation smart transportation networks
Most of the network infrastructure can be destroyed during the disaster or war, which may disable the infrastructure-based applications; in such situations, V2V links may be blocked or the link quality may be degraded due to obstacles, complex terrains, inaccessible geographical regions, and weather conditions, among others. erefore, vehicular delay-tolerant networks (VDTNs) can be considered as a necessary solution to deal with the intermittent connectivity and high network latency, where data can tolerate a certain level of delay, and is delivered in a store-carry-and-forward manner
An opportunistic virtual intersection exists only when a Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) encounters a road, and vehicles on the road and the UAV can forward packets to each other. e forwarding rules are derived by comparing the expected delivery delay and delivery probability of carrying by the UAV and the vehicle, in order to guarantee that the packet forwarding can achieve expected higher delivery performance. e main contribution of this paper is that we further improve the performance of data delivery in VDTNs by incorporating UAVs into vehicular networks
Summary
Vehicular networks have been envisioned to be critical to the generation smart transportation networks. To improve the e ciency of VDTN, the key issue is to design an e ective data delivery scheme including the routing protocol design and message forwarding management. In our previous work [8], we investigated delay-tolerant data delivery for smart grid applications, in which vehicle-assisted device-to-device (V-D2D) communications are leveraged to offload cellular networks in a store-carry-and-forward mode with low cost. Vehicular mobility is restricted by traffic pattern and road layout, which implies that the performance of VDTN is difficult to be further enhanced only relying on communications and networking among vehicles. E main contribution of this paper is that we further improve the performance of data delivery in VDTNs by incorporating UAVs into vehicular networks.
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