A Trust Based Secure and Privacy Aware Framework for Efficient Taxi and Car Sharing System

This article describes how taxi service is an essential means of mobility in many cities. Recent findings show that average automobile owners utilize their vehicles for only 5% of its time in a day. Therefore, the advent of autonomous vehicles and car sharing will make it possible for owners to engage their vehicles as taxis when not in use by utilizing its 95% free time for income generation. Sensitive private information is required to be released during a taxi service delivery, which may bring certain security and privacy issues and challenges. This may hinder the prospect of using autonomous vehicles as a form of taxi. As a result of these, the authors propose a secure and privacy-preserving taxi service framework for car sharing, which ensures protection of car owner and passengers personal details, e.g. identity, location, destination, etc. The authors developed a decay-based trust model for a framework in order to monitor and improve the quality of service rendered to passengers by vehicles. The decay-based trust model was simulated on the framework. The simulation of the decay-based trust model shows that it is a perfect model for rewarding vehicles which render good quality of service and blacklisting vehicles with frequent poor service delivery.

Communication Improvement and Traffic Control Based on V2I in Smart City Framework

This article describes how soft computing techniques are tolerant of imprecision, intended on approximation, focus on uncertainty and are based on partial truth. Current real-world problems pertaining to congested traffic is pervasively imprecise and therefore design of smart traffic control system is a challenging issue. Due to the increasing rate of vehicles at traffic points in smart cities, it creates unexpected delays during transit, chances of accidents are higher, unnecessary fuel consumption is an issue, and unhygienic environment due to pollution also degrades the health condition of general people in a normal city scenario. To avoid such problems many smart cities are currently implementing improved traffic control systems that work on the principle of traffic automation to prevent these issues. The basic challenge lies in the usage of real-time analytics performed with online traffic information and correctly applying it to some traffic flow. In this research article, an enhanced traffic management system called SCICS (Soft Computing based Intelligent Communication System) has been proposed which uses swarm intelligence as a soft computing technique with intelligent communication between smart vehicles and traffic points using the vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) concept of VANET. It uses an improved route diversion mechanism with implemented logic in nanorobots. Under a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) scenario, the communication between intelligent vehicles and infrastructure points takes place through nanorobots in a collaborative way. Simulation carried out using Ns2 simulator shows encouraging results in terms of better performance to control the traffic.

A Centralized Health Monitoring System Using Health Related Sensors Integrated to the Mobile

This article describes how health sensors, which measure health parameters, are miniaturized to fit the size of a mobile. They aim to integrate these sensors along with a mobile so as to provide data measurement to the vast population which use the mobile, and thus, create regional grid networks. The authors aim to use the mobile for updating health parameters as well as be the focal point of communication of the health information. As a result, the mobile would provide targeted distribution of the health information, which is advantageous compared to the traditional means of mass distribution of information. Also, a mobile acts as a focal point of gathering health related parameters, it provides a twofold advantage for setting up a low-cost region-specific health monitoring system.

MCFS Enhanced Route Selection Approach Using Multipath Carry Forwarding and Searching in VANET

This article describes how a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is an infrastructureless network in which vehicles are connected without wires. Routing in VANET is challenging nowadays due to increased number of a vehicle, the high mobility of nodes, dynamically changing topology and highly partitioned network, so the challenges on the roads are also increased like the road congestion, the safety problem, speed, etc. Various protocol designs have been suggested by various authors to search and forward packets to the destination node. These various algorithms use different schemes like greedy forwarding, perimeter forwarding, carry and store approach, geographic location base approach, etc. The proposed system uses both beacon packets and a geographic closure node approach to forward packets. The beacon-based strategy includes a carry and search approach to search for a routing path. Geographic forwarding will start when carry and search forwarding fails to transmit packets. Route requests will perform multicasting while a route reply follows a unicast strategy. The new proposed system achieves good PDR and an end to end delay.

Handling Medical Emergencies Through Better Interaction With Real-World Entities via GSM

This article aims to provide innovative system for tracking and monitoring health objects using RF transmitters and receivers. We begin by proposing a prototype for the system and perform a simulation to check the feasibility of this project before applying it to a real-world scenario. In this simulation model, we test the capability of the transmitter and receiver to communicate effectively and also display the data sent by the transmitter. As a result, highly flexible wireless controlled systems would enable the bridging of the distance between the user and the electronic device. This would provide an easier access to real world entities by just using mobile phones, without the need to be physically present near the object. Also, the addition ensures authenticated access to resources in view of security aspect. The workings of the system can be divided into two phases: phase one contains an RF transmitter and a receiver coupled with a central database; phase two contains a GSM modem with a unique SIM linked to the central data base via GSM network. In the first phase of the system, the RF transmitters are tagged to the objects of everyday use and have the capability to transmit signals and the paired receiver detects the transmission of the tagged object and stores its corresponding location in the central database. This is created specifically for information maintenance of the tagged objects, In the second phase of the system, a mobile phone is used to query the location of any tagged objects based on its availability in the vicinity, by sending a message to the SIM connected to a GSM modem. Object if present, the GSM modem fetches the location and other relevant information from the central database and encapsulates this information into a message which is sent back to the mobile device or phone that has requested the information.

Vehicular Fog Computing

In recent years Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have received increased attention due to its numerous applications in cooperative collision warning and traffic alert broadcasting. VANETs have been depending on cloud computing for networking, computing and data storage services. Emergence of advanced vehicular applications has led to the increased demand for powerful communication and computation facilities with low latency. With cloud computing unable to satisfy these demands, the focus has shifted to bring computation and communication facilities nearer to the vehicles, leading to the emergence of Vehicular Fog Computing (VFC). VFC installs highly virtualized computing and storage facilities at the proximity of these vehicles. The integration of fog computing into VANETs comes with a number of challenges that range from improved quality of service, security and privacy of data to efficient resource management. This paper presents an overview of this promising technology and discusses the issues and challenges in its implementation with future research directions.

A Survey of Coding and Modulation Techniques for Inter-Vehicular Communications

Direct inter-vehicular communication means that there is no infrastructure. This is in sharp contrast to mobile communication within a cellular network or between a moving vehicle and the roadside. It is assumed in this article that the mobile channel between the two vehicles is too rapidly time variable to be possible to measure it in real-time. The natural choice is then to select those coding and modulation techniques for which the knowledge of the channel state is not necessary at both the transmitter and the receiver, that is, to consider only differential and noncoherent communications technologies. As interesting options, the celebrated Golden code and the recently developed Golden-Alamouti space-time trellis coding are also proposed for inter-vehicular communications.

Vehicular Communication Network Environments

Modern society is facing serious problems with the transportation systems given the increase in traffic jams, accidents, fatalities and CO2 emissions. Thus, improving the safety and efficiency of transportation systems is imperative. Developing a sustainable transportation system requires a better usage of the existing infrastructure, the adoption of emerging technologies (e.g. embedded devices, sensors and short-range radio transmitters) and the development of applications capable of operating in wireless and spontaneous networks. In this paper, the authors give readers a global vision of the challenges and issues related to the development of applications for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET). It also presents a classification of applications and an overview of the top-level application domain. In addition, it investigates the importance of information in vehicular networks and analyses the requirements for different types of vehicular applications placing them in a table which summarized the findings. Finally, the communication schemes that underpin the operation of VANET applications as well as the security threats they are exposed to are studied.

A Review of Congestion Control Schemes for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) Communication

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are built on top of self-organizing networks, known as Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET). In VANET, each vehicle equipped with communication devices represents a node and is allowed to send and receive safety messages through wireless communication channels. These messages are either periodic (beacons) or event-driven. Beacons are transmitted periodically while the event-driven messages are generated when an abnormal condition or an imminent danger is detected. The event-driven messages should be delivered to neighbouring nodes with high reliability and limit time as a single delayed or lost message could result in loss of lives. In dense network, the periodic messages broadcast lead to broadcast storm/blind flooding problem in VANETs. It is very important to keep the communication channel free from congestion in order to ensure timely and reliable delivery of event-driven safety messages. This study presents a review of existing congestion control schemes for VANETs with the aim of discussing the contributions and drawbacks of the algorithms.

Future Trends in Mobile-Fixed Integration for Next Generation Networks

In recent years, the growth the in the number of heterogeneous interconnected systems, as well as the emergence of new requirements in applications and services are progressively changing the original simplicity and transparency of the Internet architecture. When this architecture was designed, the main goal was to interconnect stationary host. Therefore, the appearance of mobile communications has made necessary to adapt traditional protocols in order to accommodate mobile users. This implies a new interaction between the mobile network and the fixed access network. This paper describes the main IP mobility protocols both centralized and distributed paradigms, and emergent approaches based on software defined networking. Moreover, a novel classification is presented, which relates the integration of the mobility protocol with the access network. Analytical models evaluate the registration updates cost and the packet loss rate of the classified protocols.