Section: New Results

Vehicular networks and smart car platforms

Participants : Nathalie Mitton, Valeria Loscri.

Roadside Units (RSUs) are an important component of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). In a VANET, RSUs are deployed at intersections or some points along a road to help improve network connectivity, data delivery, and thus network services to vehicles. Therefore, RSU deployment has a big impact on the network performance and becomes an important issue in the design of a VANET. In general, RSU deployment is costly. To achieve a good tradeoff between deployment cost and network performance, it is expected to optimize the deployment of RSUs in a VANET. To address this challenge, considerable research work has been conducted on the optimization of RSU deployment for VANET.

To optimize the RSU deployment, the notion of centrality in a social network to RSU deployment has been introduced [40], and use it to measure the importance of an RSU position candidate in RSU deployment. Based on the notion of centrality, we propose a centrality-based RSU deployment approach and formulate the RSU deployment problem as a linear programing problem with the objective to maximize the total centrality of all position candidates selected for RSU deployment under the constraint of a given deployment budget.

Nowadays, many vehicular applications are emerging, arising from entertainment and road safety. The paradigm of Internet of Vehicles (IOV) is proliferating and it is an inevitable convergence of the existing mobile Internet and the concept of Internet-of-Things (IoT). In IoV, Internet of applications go on "wheels", then converting the existing vehicles into "digital cars" equipped with several technologies and sensors. The meeting of mobility with social interactions rises to a particular class of social networks, Vehicular Social Networks [20]. Vehicular social networks are online social networks where the social interactions are built on-the-fly, due to the opportunistic links in vehicular networks. In this context, the reliability of message dissemination becomes very important and the adding of social components allows the definition of trust parameter to be directly included in the forwarding technique.

On the other hand, the huge amount of sensors deployed in a car, are arising new types of applications and services, even if data are "confined" in the car.

However, with the increasing number of functionalities, computing and communication resources, that have to be handled by the On Board Unit (OBU), is constantly growing. OBUs are embedded systems with limited hardware resources and a critical software design that makes also a simple update procedure a not trivial operation. These constraints are combined with the typical software lifetime, which is much shorter than the lifetime of mechanical and technological components. Bearing all these points in mind, we have identified in the use of lightweight virtualization technologies a suitable mechanism, which allows to design an OBU that can satisfy several requirements in terms of efficient software and hard- ware resources management [29], [30].