Inter-Vehicular Network Technologies - New Jersey Institute of Technology

Homepage of the Inter-Vehicular Network Technologies Project at NJIT

NJIT > College of Computing Sciences > CS Department > UbiNetS Lab > INVENT

	Overview
	Research Directions
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Overview

This project aims to develop inter-vehicular network technologies for next generation smart vehicles. Such vehicles have embedded computers, GPS receivers, short-range wireless network interfaces, and potentially wireless access to the Internet. These capabilities support real-time dissemination of traffic conditions, execution of traffic queries, and reliable data exchange for emergency messages or distributed applications. The envisioned benefits of vehicular computing and networking are safer driving, dynamic route planning, and in-vehicle entertainment. We believe that the first step toward achieving these benefits is to design and implement a vehicular network protocol stack and a prototype vehicular computing platform.

Research Directions

::: Reliable Message Dissemination
Fast and reliable dissemination of alerts on accidents or other road hazards is a critical application of vehicular networks. We have designed a spatio-temporal emergency dissemination protocol that ensures timely delivery of emergency messages to all the vehicles that pass through the potentially affected region during the lifetime of the emergency. This protocol exploits a hybrid, cluster-based vehicular network architecture, where the bulk of communication between vehicles takes place over WiFi-based ad hoc networks for improved scalability and efficiency. Cellular communication is used to improve reliability when network partitions preclude the message delivery. We plan to use this protocol as a case study to analyze the possibility of providing real-time guarantees in vehicular networks. People: J. Nzouonta and C. Borcea.

::: Context-Aware Mobile Traffic Queries
Executing queries in vehicular networks implies distributed query processing at multiple nodes that could be located far away from the node that sent the request. Instead of directly requesting data from each of these nodes, we propose to send mobile queries in the regions of interest where they execute autonomously and send back just the final result. We have developed a general model and development framework for such queries based on context-aware migratory services that can migrate to different nodes in the network to accomplish their tasks. We have built a prototype mobile query for predicting traffic jams on the highways, and we plan to use it as a basic component for dynamic route planning. People: O. Riva, T. Nadeem, L. Iftode, and C. Borcea.

::: Routing and Delay Tolerant Applications
The goal is to determine the best forwarding strategy for achieving good average end-to-end throughput in vehicular networks. To overcome the limitations of existing MANET routing algorithms in vehicular networks, proved by an initial study, we are investigating methods for estimating the maximum number of hops over which nodes should establish TCP connections as function of road traffic patterns, estimated congestion, routing overhead, and total network capacity. We also plan to design routing algorithms that work efficiently within this network size limit. In case of delay tolerant applications such as peer-to-peer file sharing, we study dynamic scheduling algorithms for the network traffic, where intermediate nodes buffer and relay TCP traffic between hosts that are more than the maximum-allowed number of hops away or even in different network partitions. People: C. Zamfir, D. Purdila, J. Nzouonta, C. Borcea.

::: Secure Vehicular Cooperation
We plan to build flexible support for enforcing common security policies across all the members of an ad hoc vehicular network that execute a certain protocol or application. A node is denied network membership unless it is trusted to enforce the common policy defined in the network. We have built a trusted execution monitor based on the Trusted Platform Module specified by the Trusted Computing Group that will serve as the basic building block for policy enforcement. Since different protocols and applications have different policy enforcers, this monitor guarantees trusted execution of all the programs associated with individual policy enforcement. We are currently investigating the creation and maintenance of protocol-specific or application-specific trusted networks formed both at the link layer and as overlays at higher layers. People: G. Xu, C. Borcea, and L. Iftode.

::: Vehicular Traffic Generator
This study aims at building a realistic vehicular traffic generator for use in large scale simulations. This generator will create traffic scenarios for both highways and city configurations. Its main features include, but are not limited to, a procedure for creating digital road maps from the TIGER/Line database that contains all the roads in US, a car-following model similar to those developed for the transportation industry, a lane-changing model, and a flow-based road-changing model. People: J. Nzouonta and C. Borcea.

People

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