Service and Communication Management in Cooperative Vehicular Networks

With the increasing demand for traffic safety and efficiency and constant search for innovative solutions within the automotive market coupled with supporting initiatives from regulatory domains, the potential of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is immense. Basic vehicle and roadside infrastructure collaboration allows an increase in efficiency and safety and acts as the foundation for an extensive application set to achieve the ITS goals of cleaner, safer and more efficient travel. There are some important considerations however. Taking into account the wide array of communication technologies and plethora of proposed applications, this paper aims to address one of the major and largely unexplored challenges facing the ITS research community in relation to service and communication management (SCM), whereby the underlying communications capability is sufficiently exploited to assure satisfactory operation of deployed ITS applications. A complete SCM solution is proposed under an "Always Satisfactorily Connected" (ASC) objective; two probing techniques are examined to assess the performance of the candidate communication networks and simple policy and Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) based selection policies are considered. In addition, a standard indicative measure to analyse the effectiveness of the SCM scheme is introduced. The performance of the proposed SCM schemes is evaluated using CALMNet, a comprehensive network-centric simulation environment for CALM-based cooperative vehicular systems. Results highlight the effect of different techniques on system performance and user satisfaction.