On-board Unit Research Articles

Generating routes for autonomous driving in vehicle-to-infrastructure communications

The study of vehicular networks has attracted considerable interest in academia and the industry. In the broad area, connected vehicles and autonomous driving are technologies based on wireless data communication between vehicles or between vehicles and infrastructures. A Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) system consists of communications and computing over vehicles and related infrastructures. In such a system, wireless sensors are installed in some selected points along roads or driving areas. In autonomous driving, it is crucial for a vehicle to figure out the ideal routes by the communications between its equipped sensors and infrastructures then the vehicle is automatically moving along the routes. In this paper, we propose a Bezier curve based recursive algorithm, which effectively creates routes for vehicles through the communication between the On-Board Unit (OBU) and the Road-Side Units (RSUs). In addition, this approach generates a very low overhead. We conduct simulations to test the proposed algorithm in various situations. The experiment results demonstrate that our algorithm creates almost ideal routes.

SDN-based VANETs, Security Attacks, Applications, and Challenges

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are the specific sort of ad-hoc networks that are utilized in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). VANETs have become one of the most reassuring, promising, and quickest developing subsets of the mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). They include smart vehicles, roadside units (RSUs), and on-board units (OBUs) which correspond through inconsistent wireless network. The current research in the vehicles industry and media transmission innovations alongside the remarkable multimodal portability administrations expedited center-wise ITS, of which VANETs increase considerably more attention. The particular characteristics of the software defined networks (SDNs) use the vehicular systems by its condition of the centralized art having a complete understanding of the network. Security is an important issue in the SDN-based VANETs, as a result of the effect the threats and vulnerabilities can have on driver’s conduct and personal satisfaction. This paper opens a discourse on the security attacks that future SDN-based VANETs should confront and examines how SDNs could be advantageous in building new countermeasures. SDN-based VANETs encourage us to dispose of the confinement and difficulties that are available in the traditional VANETs. It helps us to diminish the general burden on the system by dealing with the general system through a single wireless controller. While SDN-based VANETs provide us some benefits in terms of applications and services, they also have some important challenges which need to be solved. In this study we discuss and elaborate the challenges, along with the applications, and the future directions of SDN-based VANETs. At the end we provide the conclusion of the whole study.

Modeling and Delay Analysis of Intermittent V2U Communication in Secluded Areas

This paper investigates the data-delivery latency in the context of intermittent vehicle-to-UAV (V2U) communications. Precisely, a V2U communication scenario is considered where vehicles opportunistically establish connectivity with passing by UAVs for a limited period of time during which these vehicles transmit data packets to in-range UAVs serving as flying base stations and, in turn, are responsible for delivering these packets to backbone networks and/or routing them over the Internet. A mathematical framework is established with the objective of modeling the vehicles' OnBoard Units' (OBUs') buffers as single-server queueing systems. The established queueing model will allow for the evaluation of the V2U communication system in terms of the average data packet delivery delay. Extensive simulations are conducted with the objective of asserting the validity and accuracy of the proposed queueing model as well as providing further insights into the delay sensibility to various system parameters.

Road Condition Monitoring with Source Authentication in VANET

In recent technologies, it has been said that, to improve the travel efficiency and safety of transportation systems, vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) has been used as the promising technology where each vehicle is able to collect and communicate the information about current road or traffic condition at a particular location using an embedded on-board unit with the help of distributed roadside units. Examples are: While detection of some accident, congestion, jam, etc., vehicles broadcast warning signals to the nearby vehicles which would give a better awareness to every nearby vehicles about the driving environment and these nearby vehicles would change the driving plan if needed. The VANET technology has gained great attentions from both industry and academics in the recent days.

Stealthy Monitoring and Control of Vehicle Safety System

In recent times, traffic rules are more often violated by the drivers. And, also driving at high speed needs to be controlled. So, stealthy monitoring and control of the vehicle is required. Sometimes it is not possible to see the boards and traffic symbols kept alongside of the road. The main objective of this paper is to design and develop an efficient system that can effectively detect speed violations on the road using RF technology. The proposed system gives an alert to the driver through LCD and voice boards. In the proposed system, if over speeding vehicles don’t get controlled manually, then the system turns ON and will get controlled automatically and detect any vehicle opposite to, utilizing the vehicle on-board unit. The challenges to overcome include GSM-based Accident/Panic alert using ARDUINO mega.

Trustworthiness of Self-Driving Vehicles for Intelligent Transportation Systems in Industry Applications

To enhance industrial production and automation, rapid and faster transportation of raw materials and finished products to and from distributed factories, warehouses and outlets are essential. To reduce cost with increased efficiency, this will increasingly see the use of connected and self-driving commercial vehicles fitted with industrial grade sensors on roads, shared with normal and self-driving passenger vehicles. For its wide adoption, the trustworthiness of self-driving vehicles in the intelligent transportation system (ITS) is pivotal. In this article, we introduce a novel model to measure the overall trustworthiness of a self-driving vehicle considering on-Board unit (OBU) components, GPS data and safety messages. In calculating the trustworthiness of individual OBU components, CertainLogic and beta distribution function (BDF) are used. Those trust values are fused using both the dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) and a logical operator of CertainLogic. Results of our simulation show that our proposed method can effectively determine the trust of self-driving vehicles.

Tehergépjárművek menetadatainak elemzése egy meghatározott szállítási útvonalon

In this paper the development of a driving cycle for lorries traveling a certain route is presented. A typical transportation route has been selected, which used by lorries instrumented with the proper data-collecting equipment. We used these on-board units to collect data over a long time period in the real-life traffic. We filtered the collected data, and carried out a statistical evaluation on the basis of the measured data.

Smart Railway Operation Aid System for Facilities With Low-Safety Requirements

Rail traffic control systems are undergoing an important transformation. ERMTS/ECTS, CBTC, PTC and other train control systems based on radio communication are being deployed in different countries. These systems meet the high safety requirements for passenger traffic, and cover from congested urban areas to high-speed trains. However, there is a set of facilities, such as ports, dry ports, facilities for the repair and maintenance of trains, logistic centers, mines, etc., whose trains, that only carry freight, circulate in a controlled environment at a low speed. These facilities have low safety requirements. For them, present commercial systems become too expensive, so that, in most cases, railway traffic is still handled manually. This paper presents a system to aid in the exploitation of rail traffic for this type of facilities, called SFPS (Seville Ferro-Port System). SFPS presents many of the features of the most advanced traffic control systems, but incorporates innovations based on Information and Communications Technologies to reduce costs. To this end, train location is based on a satellite global positioning system, physical signs are replaced by virtual ones, displayed in an On-Board Unit, and communication is almost entirely wireless. SFPS has been in a trial phase since March 2016, covering part of the railway facilities of the Port Authority of Seville, with satisfactory results.

Vehicular-OBUs-As-On-Demand-Fogs: Resource and Context Aware Deployment of Containerized Micro-Services

Observing the headway in vehicular industry, new applications are developed demanding more resources. For instance, real-time vehicular applications require fast processing of the vast amount of generated data by vehicles in order to maintain service availability and reachability while driving. Fog devices are capable of bringing cloud intelligence near the edge, making them a suitable candidate to process vehicular requests. However, their location, processing power, and technology used to host and update services affect their availability and performance while considering the mobility patterns of vehicles. In this paper, we overcome the aforementioned limitations by taking advantage of the evolvement of On-Board Units, Kubeadm Clustering, Docker Containerization, and micro-services technologies. In this context, we propose an efficient resource and context aware approach for deploying containerized micro-services on on-demand fogs called Vehicular-OBUs-As-On-Demand-Fogs. Our proposed scheme embeds (1) a Kubeadm based approach for clustering OBUs and enabling on-demand micro-services deployment with the least costs and time using Docker containerization technology, (2) a hybrid multi-layered networking architecture to maintain reachability between the requesting user and available vehicular fog cluster, and (3) a vehicular multi-objective container placement model for producing efficient vehicles selection and services distribution. An Evolutionary Memetic Algorithm is elaborated to solve our vehicular container placement problem. Experiments and simulations demonstrate the relevance and efficiency of our approach compared to other recent techniques in the literature.

Evaluating TCP performance of routing protocols for traffic exchange in street-parked vehicles based fog computing infrastructure

As most vehicles remain parked 95% of its time, this suggests that leveraging the use of On-board Units (OBUs) in parked vehicles would provide communication and computation services to other mobile and fixed nodes for delivery of services such as multimedia streaming, data storage and data processing. The nearby vehicles can form an infrastructure using IEEE 802.11p communication interface, facilitating communication, computation and storage services to the end users. We refer to this as a Vehicular Fog Computing (VFC) infrastructure. In this study, using NS-2 simulator, we investigate how six routing protocols consisting of two proactive routing protocols, Destination Sequence Destination Vector (DSDV) and Fisheye State Routing (FSR); two reactive routing protocols, Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR); and two geographic routing protocols, Distance Routing Effect Algorithm for Mobility (DREAM) and Location Aided Routing (LAR) perform when forwarding TCP traffic among the parked vehicles that form a VFC infrastructure in an urban street parking scenario. In order to reflect an urban street parking scenario, we consider a traffic mobility traces that are generated using SUMO in our simulation. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first effort to understand how vehicle density, vehicle speed and parking duration can influence TCP in an urban street parking scenario when packet forwarding decision is made using proactive, reactive and geographic routing protocols. In our performance evaluation, positive results are observed on the influence of parking duration in parked vehicles as TCP performance in all routing protocols increases with longer parking duration. However, variable speed in parked vehicles and moving vehicles in an urban street parking scenario may not have significant influence on TCP performance, especially in case of reactive and proactive routing protocols. Further, our findings reveal that vehicle density in a VFC infrastructure can noticeably influence TCP performance. Towards the end of the paper, we delineate some important future research issues in order to improve routing performance in a street-parked vehicle based VFC infrastructure.

Vehicular Networking-Enabled Vehicle State Prediction via Two-Level Quantized Adaptive Kalman Filtering

The accurate prediction of vehicle state based on the data acquired by the vehicular networking system plays an important role in improving traffic safety in the transportation section. However, it is difficult to accurately predict the vehicle state due to the highly dynamic road environment and various drivers’ behaviors. To this end, in this article, we propose a two-level quantized adaptive Kalman filter (KF) algorithm based on the autoregressive moving average (MA) model to predict the vehicle state (including the moving direction, driving lane, vehicle speed, and acceleration). First, we propose a vehicular networking system to acquire the vehicle data by exchanging traffic data between the onboard unit and the roadside unit (RSU). Then, we predict the vehicle state at the edge cloud server (ECS) equipped at the RSU. Specifically, we utilize the autoregressive MA model to predict vehicle acceleration at the next moment. Then, the predicted vehicle acceleration is used as an input variable of the adaptive KF model to predict the vehicle location and speed at the next moment, in which we quantify the predicted vehicle location to the moving direction and the driving lane. Finally, the ECS broadcasts the predicted state to other RSUs. Through the communication with the road unit, all vehicles moving at the intersection can share vehicles states each other. In this doing, we can efficiently improve traffic safety in the intersection. We provide numerical simulations to validate the effectiveness of the autoregressive MA model used for predicting acceleration. Then, we evaluate the efficiency of the proposed two-level quantized adaptive KF algorithm. Compared with five conventional prediction algorithms, our proposed algorithm can improve the speed prediction accuracy by 90.62%, 89.81%, 88.91%, 82.76%, and 70.77%, respectively, which implies that our algorithm is a promising scheme for predicting the vehicle state in vehicular networks.

Fast-track message authentication protocol for DSRC using HMAC and group keys

The exchange of information between vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) should be secured to provide an intelligent transport system. VANET uses certificate revocation lists (CRL) and public key infrastructures (PKI) for its security. In any PKI algorithms validity of the messages received from the sender is executed by checking the senders certificate in current CRL and verify the authenticity of the signature and certificate of the sender. Checking the CRL and verifying the authenticity is time-consuming and affects system performance drastically. This paper offers an accelerated and secure authentication method that utilizes a hash message authentication code (HMAC) in combination with secret keys for the revocation checking process. By using HMAC and enhancing the CRL checking procedure, the algorithm provides improved performance of the system parameters like authentication delay, end-to-end delay, and packet delivery ratio. Also, this algorithm reduces the delay involved in vehicle authentication. This novel algorithm uses the random distribution of keys that enables the authenticated on-board unit to securely share and update a secret key. An authentication delay of 77.29 μs, end-to-end delay of 13.56 ms and packet delivery ratio of 81.2% is achieved.

Reinforcement Learning Based PHY Authentication for VANETs

Mobile edge computing in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) suffers from rogue edge attacks due to the vehicle mobility and the network scale. In this paper, we present a physical authentication scheme to resist rogue edge attackers whose goal is to send spoofing signals to attack VANETs. This authentication scheme exploits the channel states of the shared ambient radio signals of the mobile device and its serving edge such as the onboard unit during the same moving trace and applies reinforcement learning to select the authentication modes and parameters. By applying transfer learning to save the learning time and applies deep learning to further improve the authentication performance, this scheme enables mobile devices in VANETs to optimize their authentication modes and parameters without being aware of the VANET channel model, the packet generation model, and the spoofing model. We provide the convergence bound such as the mobile device utility, evaluate the computational complexity of the physical authentication scheme, and verify the analysis results via simulations. Simulation and experimental results show that this scheme improves the authentication accuracy with reduced energy consumption against rogue edge attacks.

Edge-Based Collision Avoidance for Vehicles and Vulnerable Users: An Architecture Based on MEC

Collision avoidance, one of the most promising applications for vehicular networks, dramatically improves the safety of vehicles that support it. In this article, we investigate how it can be extended to benefit vulnerable users, such as pedestrians and bicyclists, equipped with a smartphone. Owing to the reduced capabilities of smartphones compared to vehicular onboard units (OBUs), traditional distributed approaches are not viable, and multi-access edge computing (MEC) support is needed. Thus, we propose an MECbased collision-avoidance system, discuss its architecture, and evaluate its performance. We find that, thanks to MEC, we are able to extend to vulnerable users the collision avoidance protection traditionally applied to vehicles, without impacting its effectiveness or latency.

Enabling performance and security simulation studies of intelligent traffic signal light control with VENTOS-HIL

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) simulators have gained widespread adoption in the research community given the fact that they can simulate near real life scenarios to evaluate driver-safety applications without endangering human lives. In this paper, we present the VEhicular NeTwork Open Simulator (VENTOS), a closed-loop VANET simulator that combines the capabilities of both communication network (OMNET++) and vehicular traffic simulators (SUMO). As an alternative to current proprietary VANET simulators, VENTOS is a free, open-source simulator that is designed for vehicular traffic flow analysis and can incorporate new control logic, such as intelligent traffic controller, collaborative driving, dynamic routing, and self-driving capability. VENTOS supports V2X (Vehicle-to-Vehicle or Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) communication through dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) integration. This paper will give an overview of the VENTOS architecture and its extension, VENTOS-HIL, which supports hardware-in-the-loop emulation using physical devices such as On-Board Units (OBUs) or Roadside Units (RSUs). We then demonstrate how VENTOS can be utilized to simulate and evaluate the performance of multi-modal, adaptive traffic signal control (TSC) as well as to illustrate the security vulnerability of intelligent TSC in the presence of falsified data attacks.

Robust Coordination of a Hybrid AC/DC Multi-Energy Ship Microgrid With Flexible Voyage and Thermal Loads

This paper studies the robust operation of a novel hybrid AC/DC multi-energy ship (MES) microgrid with flexible thermal loads and voyage. Apart from the diesel generators and battery storage, the photovoltaic system, combined cooling heat and power (CCHP) unit, thermal storage and power-to-thermal conversion unit are also included. Then, to guarantee a safe and reliable voyage, the diverse uncertainties from renewable energies, onboard power loads and outdoor temperature are addressed by a robust coordination method. This method coordinates all the onboard units in different timescales by the two-stage robust optimization (RO) approach. In this regard, the ship operating cost is minimized under the worst case of uncertainties, at the same time, all the operational constraints are fully satisfied. By the constraint linearization process, the robust coordination model is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem and solved by the efficient Cplex solver. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the case study and comparisons with the existing ship operation benchmarks. The simulation results indicate that our method could reduce the ship operating cost and immune against the diverse uncertainties.

Vehicular HetNet load distribution using centralized control of software‐defined network

SummaryCurrent vehicular communication systems experience from nonflexible and costly devices, complicated control‐plane protocols, and vendor‐specific configuration interfaces. In the next generation vehicular communication, a mobile device (MD) will be installed on a car capable of accessing multiple services from different networks. So heterogeneous networks (HetNets) may play a vital role in vehicular communication. Despite heterogeneity, flawless connectivity between different systems is a basic need of the travellers. The key challenge for seamless connectivity is the design of a vertical handover (VHO) scheme. We claim that software‐defined networking (SDN) can make things easier in the design and supervision of VHO in vehicular HetNet. The proposed method maximizes the HetNet utilization with lesser handover by balancing the load among the HetNets. Simulation results performed in MATLAB justified that this novel architecture with proper VHO technique boosts the performance by balancing the load, reducing unnecessary VHO, etc. Performance is analyzed by considering four studies, ie, handover served ratio (HSR), on board units (OBUs), OBU served ratio (OSR), and total throughput and total capacities of road side units (RSUs) to serve handover demands from OBUs. It is observed that the HSR increases rapidly as the number of OBUs increases, which indicates almost all the handover requested OBUs are allocated resources by a connected RSU. We also studied the served total throughput by considering VHO with SDN, without SDN in the average case and without SDN in the best case, and it is observed that with SDN as a central controller, the total OSR and total throughput is increased.

On-board unit to connect personal mobility vehicles to the IoT

Abstract The basis of smart city services is urban sensing, i.e., the collection of data from sensors deployed in urban settings. However, it has been recently when mobile objects have started to be monitored to feed smart applications within the smart city ecosystems. Most of the advances in this area focus on gathering data from public transportation services such as buses or trams, which use to employ regular cellular or WiFi-based networks and state-of-the-art TCP/IP protocols. Although this covers a basic on-board equipment to report position and other sensor data, there is not a direct integration of Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities in urban transportation and, in general, in moving “things”. Communication technologies used in regular wireless sensor networks such as ZigBee or Bluetooth are not appropriate for high mobility patterns. The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) paradigm aims at filling these gaps, exploiting the synergy between IoT and vehicular networks. It is an emerging area in which extra efforts should be paid to cover constrained capabilities of end devices installed on personal mobility devices, e.g., scooters, segways or bicycles. The solution proposed here deals with the connectivity of moving objects by developing an on-board unit for energy-constrained vehicles, integrating communication capabilities using the Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies Long Range Wide-area Network (LoRaWAN) and Narrow-Band IoT (NB-IoT) to efficiently collect data. A set of sensors are included to target services in the areas of urban mobility, enhanced environmental perception and speed-up of city operations. The on-board unit has been evaluated through real-life experiments to study especially its communication capabilities with NB-IoT, obtaining good performances in terms of packet delivery ratio and network delay under non-ideal coverage settings. Results show that NB-IoT presents better performances than LoRaWAN, as compared to our previous experiences, with negligible packet loss rates and two-way delays under 100 ms with Internet nodes, at the expense of needing a proper operator network deployment and consuming extra energy due to NB-IoT protocol complexity.

Off-Street Vehicular Fog for Catering Applications in 5G/B5G: A Trust-Based Task Mapping Solution and Open Research Issues

One of the key enablers in serving the applications requiring stringent latency in 5G networks is fog computing as it is situated closer to the end users. With the technological advancement of vehicles’ on-board units, their computing capabilities are becoming robust, and considering the underutilization of the off-street vehicles, we envision that the off-street vehicles can be an enormously useful computational source for the fog computing. Additionally, clustering the vehicles would be advantageous in order to improve the service availability. As the vehicles become highly connected, trust is needed especially in distributed environments. However, vehicles are made from different manufacturers, and have different platforms, security mechanisms, and varying parking duration. These lead to the unpredictable behavior of the vehicles where quantifying trust value of vehicles would be difficult. A trust-based solution is necessary for task mapping as a task has a set of properties including expected time to complete, and trust requirements that need to be met. However, the existing metrics used for trust evaluation in the vehicular fog computing such as velocity and direction are not applicable in the off-street vehicle fog environments. In this paper, we propose a framework for quantifying the trust value of off-street vehicle fog computing facilities in 5G networks and forming logical clusters of vehicles based on the trust values. This allows tasks to be shared with multiple vehicles in the same cluster that meets the tasks’ trust requirements. Further, we propose a novel task mapping algorithm to increase the vehicle resource utilization and meet the desired trust requirements while maintaining imposed latency requirements of 5G applications. Results obtained using iFogSim simulator demonstrate that the proposed solution increases vehicle resource utilization and reduces task drop noticeably. This paper presents open research issues pertaining to the study to lead...

Cloud-Based Service Oriented Architecture for Social Vehicular Ad-hoc Network Communications

This article offers a social networking platform for vehicles, based on cloud computing and service oriented architecture called CSS-IoV for communication and collaboration of vehicle to vehicle (V2V), and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I). CSS-IoV contains five layers: application layer, application service layer, services layer, cloud infrastructure layer, and layer of vehicles. The application layer operation is associated with the functionality of on-board units (OBUs) and road-side units (RSUs). The service layer runs on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud application services to improve applications. To expand and combine web services on this layer, the application developer and builders can effectively develop the new functions and programs for communication. With the support of dynamic and automated service collaboration, people can easily help and communicate with each other by using OBUs. Our results shows that the proposed scheme provide the best results in terms of both type of communication in VANETs.