Evaluating the Impact of Drone Signaling in Crosswalk Scenario

The characteristic pillars of a city are its economy, its mobility, its environment, its inhabitants, its way of life, and its organization. Since 1980, the concept of smart city generally consists of optimizing costs, organization, and the well-being of inhabitants. The idea is to develop means and solutions capable of meeting the needs of the population, while preserving resources and the environment. Owing to their little size, their flexibility, and their low cost, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are today used in a huge number of daily life applications. UAV use cases can be classified into three categories: data covering (like surveillance and event covering), data relaying (like delivery and emergency services), and data dissemination (like cartography and precise agriculture). In addition, the interest to Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) has risen in these recent years, especially in the context of smart cities. In such systems, both drivers and traffic managers share the information and cooperate to coordinate their actions to ensure safety, traffic efficiency, and environment preservation. In this work, we aimed at introducing a UAV in a use case that is likely to happen in C-ITS. A conflict is considered involving a car and a pedestrian. A UAV observes from the top of the scene and will play the role of the situation controller, the information collector, and the assignment of the instructions to the car driver in case of a harmful situation to avoid car-pedestrian collision. To this end, we highlight interactions between the UAV and the car vehicle (U2V communication), as well as between the UAV and infrastructure (U2I communication). Hence, the benefit of using UAV is emphasized to reduce accident gravity rate, braking distance, energy consumption, and occasional visibility reduction.

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Eco-Efficient Mobility in Smart City Scenarios

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su12208443 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (20) ◽

pp. 8443

Author(s):

Ramon Sanchez-Iborra ◽

Luis Bernal-Escobedo ◽

José Santa

Keyword(s):

Intelligent Transportation Systems ◽

Smart City ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Low Cost ◽

Transportation Systems ◽

Area Network ◽

Wide Area Network ◽

Fully Integrated ◽

Personal Mobility ◽

Traffic Efficiency

Cooperative-Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) have brought a technological revolution, especially for ground vehicles, in terms of road safety, traffic efficiency, as well as in the experience of drivers and passengers. So far, these advances have been focused on traditional transportation means, leaving aside the new generation of personal vehicles that are nowadays flooding our streets. Together with bicycles and motorcycles, personal mobility devices such as segways or electric scooters are firm sustainable alternatives that represent the future to achieve eco-friendly personal mobility in urban settings. In a near future, smart cities will become hyper-connected spaces where these vehicles should be integrated within the underlying C-ITS ecosystem. In this paper, we provide a wide overview of the opportunities and challenges related to this necessary integration as well as the communication solutions that are already in the market to provide these moving devices with low-cost and efficient connectivity. We also present an On-Board Unit (OBU) prototype with different communication options based on the Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) paradigm and several sensors to gather environmental information to facilitate eco-efficiency services. As the attained results suggest, this module allows personal vehicles to be fully integrated in smart city environments, presenting the possibilities of LoRaWAN and Narrow Band-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) communication technologies to provide vehicle connectivity and enable mobile urban sensing.

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An Advanced Deep Learning Approach for Multi-Object Counting in Urban Vehicular Environments

Future Internet ◽

10.3390/fi13120306 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (12) ◽

pp. 306

Author(s):

Ahmed Dirir ◽

Henry Ignatious ◽

Hesham Elsayed ◽

Manzoor Khan ◽

Mohammed Adib ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Deep Learning ◽

Intelligent Transportation Systems ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Weather Conditions ◽

Research Area ◽

Transportation Systems ◽

Detection Accuracy ◽

Adverse Weather ◽

Object Counting ◽

The Impact

Object counting is an active research area that gained more attention in the past few years. In smart cities, vehicle counting plays a crucial role in urban planning and management of the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to address this problem. However, the resulting detection accuracy is still not adequate. This paper proposes an efficient approach that uses deep learning concepts and correlation filters for multi-object counting and tracking. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated using a dataset consisting of 16 videos with different features to examine the impact of object density, image quality, angle of view, and speed of motion towards system accuracy. Performance evaluation exhibits promising results in normal traffic scenarios and adverse weather conditions. Moreover, the proposed approach outperforms the performance of two recent approaches from the literature.

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Routing and Mobility Management in the Internet of Things

10.5753/sbrc_estendido.2020.12415 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Bruno Pereira Santos ◽

Luiz Filipe Menezes Vieira ◽

Antonio Alfredo Ferreira Loureiro

Keyword(s):

Internet Of Things ◽

Mobility Management ◽

Intelligent Transportation Systems ◽

Computer Network ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Transportation Systems ◽

The Internet ◽

Research Areas ◽

New Research ◽

The Impact

This Ph.D. Thesis proposes new techniques for routing and mobility management for Internet of Things (IoT). In the future IoT, everyday mobile objects will probably be connected to the Internet. Currently, static IoT's devices have already been connected, but handle mobile devices suitably still being an open issue in IoT context. Then, solutions for routing mobility detection, handover, and mobility management are proposed through an algorithm that integrates Machine Learning (ML) and mobility metrics to figure out devices' mobility events, which we named Dribble. Also, an IPv6 hierarchical routing protocol named Mobile Matrix to boost efficient (memory and fault tolerance) end-to-end connectivity over mobility scenarios. The Thesis contributions are supported by numerous peer-reviewed publications in national and international conferences and journals included in ISI-JCR. Also, the applicability of this Thesis is evident by showing that our results overcome state-of-the-art in static and mobile scenarios, as well as, the impact of the proposed solutions is a step forward in at least two new research areas so-called Internet of Mobile Things (IoMT) and Social IoT, where devices move around and do social ties respectively. Moreover, during the Ph.D. degree, the author has contributed to different computer network fields rather than routing by publishing in areas like social networks, smart cities, intelligent transportation systems, software-defined networks, and parallel computing.

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Authentication-Based Secure Data Dissemination Protocol and Framework for 5G-Enabled VANET

Future Internet ◽

10.3390/fi12040063 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (4) ◽

pp. 63

Author(s):

Nishu Gupta ◽

Ravikanti Manaswini ◽

Bongaram Saikrishna ◽

Francisco Silva ◽

Ariel Teles

Keyword(s):

Automobile Industry ◽

Intelligent Transportation Systems ◽

Data Dissemination ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Intelligent Transportation ◽

Transportation Systems ◽

The Internet ◽

Vehicular Communication ◽

Security Attacks ◽

Architecture Model

The amalgamation of Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) with the Internet of Things (IoT) leads to the concept of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). IoV forms a solid backbone for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), which paves the way for technologies that better explain about traffic efficiency and their management applications. IoV architecture is seen as a big player in different areas such as the automobile industry, research organizations, smart cities and intelligent transportation for various commercial and scientific applications. However, as VANET is vulnerable to various types of security attacks, the IoV structure should ensure security and efficient performance for vehicular communications. To address these issues, in this article, an authentication-based protocol (A-MAC) for smart vehicular communication is proposed along with a novel framework towards an IoV architecture model. The scheme requires hash operations and uses cryptographic concepts to transfer messages between vehicles to maintain the required security. Performance evaluation helps analyzing its strength in withstanding various types of security attacks. Simulation results demonstrate that A-MAC outshines other protocols in terms of communication cost, execution time, storage cost, and overhead.

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Transport Inequalities and the Adoption of Intelligent Transportation Systems in Africa: A Research Landscape

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su132212891 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (22) ◽

pp. 12891

Author(s):

Olasupo O. Ajayi ◽

Antoine B. Bagula ◽

Hloniphani C. Maluleke ◽

Isaac A. Odun-Ayo

Keyword(s):

Systematic Review ◽

Information And Communication Technologies ◽

Intelligent Transportation Systems ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Intelligent Transportation ◽

Transportation Systems ◽

Western World ◽

Smart Transportation ◽

African Cities ◽

The Impact

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), also known as Smart Transportation, is an infusion of information and communication technologies into transportation. ITS are a key component of smart cities, which have seen rapid global development in the last few decades. This has in turn translated to an increase in the deployment and adoption of ITS, particularly in countries in the Western world. Unfortunately, this is not the case with the developing countries of Africa and Asia, where dilapidated road infrastructure, poorly maintained public/mass transit vehicles and poverty are major concerns. However, the impact of Westernization and “imported technologies” cannot be overlooked; thus, despite the aforementioned challenges, ITS have found their way into African cities. In this paper, a systematic review was performed to determine the state of the art of ITS in Africa. The output of this systematic review was then fed into a hybrid multi-criteria model to analyse the research landscape, identify connections between published works and reveal research gaps and inequalities in African ITS. African peculiarities inhibiting the widespread implementation of ITS were then discussed, followed by the development of a conceptual architecture for an integrated ITS for African cities.

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Exploiting Mobile Edge Computing for Enhancing Vehicular Applications in Smart Cities

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s19051073 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 19 (5) ◽

pp. 1073 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Hesham El-Sayed ◽

Moumena Chaqfeh

Keyword(s):

Traffic Safety ◽

Intelligent Transportation Systems ◽

Vehicular Networks ◽

Data Dissemination ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Transportation Systems ◽

Edge Computing ◽

Communication Overhead ◽

Mobile Edge Computing ◽

Communication Frameworks

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been recently proposed to bring computing capabilities closer to mobile endpoints, with the aim of providing low latency and real-time access to network information via applications and services. Several attempts have been made to integrate MEC in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), including new architectures, communication frameworks, deployment strategies and applications. In this paper, we explore existing architecture proposals for integrating MEC in vehicular environments, which would allow the evolution of the next generation ITS in smart cities. Moreover, we classify the desired applications into four major categories. We rely on a MEC architecture with three layers to propose a data dissemination protocol, which can be utilized by traffic safety and travel convenience applications in vehicular networks. Furthermore, we provide a simulation-based prototype to evaluate the performance of our protocol. Simulation results show that our proposed protocol can significantly improve the performance of data dissemination in terms of data delivery, communication overhead and delay. In addition, we highlight challenges and open issues to integrate MEC in vehicular networking environments for further research.

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Man-In-The-Middle Attacks in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks: Evaluating the Impact of Attackers’ Strategies

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s18114040 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 18 (11) ◽

pp. 4040 ◽

Cited By ~ 15

Author(s):

Farhan Ahmad ◽

Asma Adnane ◽

Virginia Franqueira ◽

Fatih Kurugollu ◽

Lu Liu

Keyword(s):

Intelligent Transportation Systems ◽

Network Performance ◽

Traffic Accidents ◽

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks ◽

Ad Hoc ◽

Transportation Systems ◽

Packet Losses ◽

Traffic Efficiency ◽

Man In The Middle ◽

The Impact

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET), a vital component of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technology, relies on communication between dynamically connected vehicles and static Road Side Units (RSU) to offer various applications (e.g., collision avoidance alerts, steep-curve warnings and infotainment). VANET has a massive potential to improve traffic efficiency, and road safety by exchanging critical information between nodes (vehicles and RSU), thus reducing the likelihood of traffic accidents. However, this communication between nodes is subject to a variety of attacks, such as Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks which represent a major risk in VANET. It happens when a malicious node intercepts or tampers with messages exchanged between legitimate nodes. In this paper, we studied the impact on network performance of different strategies which attackers can adopt to launch MITM attacks in VANET, such as fleet or random strategies. In particular, we focus on three goals of MITM attacks—message delayed, message dropped and message tampered. The simulation results indicate that these attacks have a severe influence on the legitimate nodes in VANET as the network experience high number of compromised messages, high end-to-end delays and preeminent packet losses.

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Service-Oriented Cooperation Policies for Intelligent Ground Vehicles Approaching Intersections

Applied Sciences ◽

10.3390/app8091647 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 8 (9) ◽

pp. 1647 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Kailong Zhang ◽

Ce Xie ◽

Yujia Wang ◽

Min Wang ◽

Arnaud Fortelle ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Intelligent Transportation Systems ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Transportation Systems ◽

Intelligent Vehicles ◽

Vehicular Communication ◽

Ground Vehicles ◽

Traffic Efficiency ◽

Single Vehicle ◽

Service Oriented ◽

Major Factors

With the coming of intelligent vehicles and vehicular communication, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) of connected vehicles are emerging and now evolving to Cooperative-ITS (C-ITS), as service platforms for smart cities. Considering new service properties, the autonomous cooperation of such vehicles has exhibited novel QoS features that imply new requirements: guaranteeing the traffic efficiency of any emergent vehicle while trying to promote the throughput at an intersection. So, after analyzing the classic reservation-based cooperation mechanisms, new QoS-oriented cooperation methods and policies are studied in this work. Concretely, several models of related traffic objects we have proposed are firstly introduced briefly. Then, the scheduling policies of vehicles approaching an intersection have been presented, including three existing policies (FAFP-SV, FAFP-SQ, and HQEP-SV) and five new polices (FAFP-SQ-SV, FAFP-MQ, HWFP-SQ, HWFP-SQ-SV, HWFP-MQ). These policies combine two major factors: vehicular priority for scheduling and concurrency in traffics. The first one includes the vehicular arrival-time, priority mapped to QoS, and the weight of reserved vehicles on a lane etc. In addition, the second refers to schedule a platoon rather than single vehicle each time, or platoons on different lanes instead of one platoon on only one lane. All these policies have been implemented, and further, verified within the parameter-configurable traffic simulator QoS-CITS (v2.1) we designed and developed with C#. Abundant experiments have been conducted with configured typical traffic scenes, and experimental results show that HWFP-SQ-SV and HWFP-MQ can guarantee both the QoS of emergent vehicles and traffic throughput better than other six policies.

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Robust Filtering Techniques for RTK Positioning in Harsh Propagation Environments

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s21041250 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 (4) ◽

pp. 1250

Author(s):

Daniel Medina ◽

Haoqing Li ◽

Jordi Vilà-Valls ◽

Pau Closas

Keyword(s):

Intelligent Transportation Systems ◽

Robust Statistics ◽

Real Data ◽

Transportation Systems ◽

Global Navigation Satellite Systems ◽

Mixed Integer ◽

Robust Filtering ◽

Precise Positioning ◽

The Impact ◽

Filtering Techniques

Global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) play a key role in intelligent transportation systems such as autonomous driving or unmanned systems navigation. In such applications, it is fundamental to ensure a reliable precise positioning solution able to operate in harsh propagation conditions such as urban environments and under multipath and other disturbances. Exploiting carrier phase observations allows for precise positioning solutions at the complexity cost of resolving integer phase ambiguities, a procedure that is particularly affected by non-nominal conditions. This limits the applicability of conventional filtering techniques in challenging scenarios, and new robust solutions must be accounted for. This contribution deals with real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning and the design of robust filtering solutions for the associated mixed integer- and real-valued estimation problem. Families of Kalman filter (KF) approaches based on robust statistics and variational inference are explored, such as the generalized M-based KF or the variational-based KF, aiming to mitigate the impact of outliers or non-nominal measurement behaviors. The performance assessment under harsh propagation conditions is realized using a simulated scenario and real data from a measurement campaign. The proposed robust filtering solutions are shown to offer excellent resilience against outlying observations, with the variational-based KF showcasing the overall best performance in terms of Gaussian efficiency and robustness.

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A Multi-Loop Vehicle-Counting Method under Gray Mode and RGB Mode

Applied Sciences ◽

10.3390/app11156831 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (15) ◽

pp. 6831

Author(s):

Yue Chen ◽

Jian Lu

Keyword(s):

Intelligent Transportation Systems ◽

High Efficiency ◽

Road Traffic ◽

Low Cost ◽

Rapid Development ◽

Intelligent Transportation ◽

Transportation Systems ◽

Counting Method ◽

Moving Vehicle ◽

Available Information

With the rapid development of road traffic, real-time vehicle counting is very important in the construction of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). Compared with traditional technologies, the video-based method for vehicle counting shows great importance and huge advantages in its low cost, high efficiency, and flexibility. However, many methods find difficulty in balancing the accuracy and complexity of the algorithm. For example, compared with traditional and simple methods, deep learning methods may achieve higher precision, but they also greatly increase the complexity of the algorithm. In addition to that, most of the methods only work under one mode of color, which is a waste of available information. Considering the above, a multi-loop vehicle-counting method under gray mode and RGB mode was proposed in this paper. Under gray and RGB modes, the moving vehicle can be detected more completely; with the help of multiple loops, vehicle counting could better deal with different influencing factors, such as driving behavior, traffic environment, shooting angle, etc. The experimental results show that the proposed method is able to count vehicles with more than 98.5% accuracy while dealing with different road scenes.

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