Vehicular Networks

Description

Recent developments in the automotive industry point to a new emerging domain of connected vehicles, in which vehicles equipped with radios can communicate a wide range of information with each other and the wider Internet, including traffic and safety updates as well as infotainment content. The broad goal of our research is to develop a hybrid network architecture for such vehicular networks which combines both the existing cellular infrastructure as well as new vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication capabilities. The hypothesis is that such a hybrid network architecture will improve cost, capacity, and robustness, compared to either a purely centralized cellular-based approach or a purely distributed V2V approach. Under a hybrid architecture, our research in this area aims to design protocols for information dissemination, aggregation, and storage, that can exploit the spatio-temporally localized nature of vehicular applications, as well as techniques for offloading computation from vehicles to road-side edge or cloud-based infrastructure.

This project is a unique academia-industry collaborative project between researchers at the University of Southern California and General Motors. While the focus is very much on basic research disseminated to the academic community through publications, the close interaction with a prominent industry partner enables the research to have a strong impact on real-world vehicular networks. The aimed-for advance in information technology for the automotive domain could have a significant social impact by enabling improvements in traffic safety, efficiency, user comfort and productivity.

People

PI/Director: Bhaskar Krishnamachari

Ph.D. Students:
Pradipta Ghosh
Keyvan Rezaei Moghadam
Maheswaran Sathiamoorthy
Quynh Nguyen
Shangxing Wang

Collaborators:
Fan Bai – General Motors Research

Projects

• NSF IC NoW
• GM Sponsored Research

Links

• One step closer to KITT: cars that talk to each other (Christina Hernandez Sherwood)
• Vehicular network coming to a smart car near you? (Barb Darrow)
• Talk at TR 35: by Dr. Bhaskar Krisnamachari (2011- Video by MIT Technology Review)
  

   

   

• Coded Vehicular Storage Video: Simulation video showing that the use of erasure code can significantly speed up the dissemination of large-files in a vehicular network.
  

   

   

Publications

1. Fan Bai and Bhaskar Krishnamachari,​ “Revealing a Hidden, Stable Spectral Structure of Urban Vehicular Traffic“, IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference, 2021. (Best Paper Award)
2. Kwame-Lante Wright, Pranav Sakulkar, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Fan Bai, “VESPER: A Real-time Processing Framework for Vehicle Perception Augmentation,” In 3rd Workshop on Integrating Edge Computing, Caching, and Offloading in Next Generation Networks (IECCO 2019) in conjunction with IEEE INFOCOM. Paris, France, April, 2019.
3. Keyvan R. Moghdam, Kai Huang, and Bhaskar Krishnamachari, “An Algorithmic Approach for Environmentally-Friendly Traffic Control in Smart Cities“, ACM UrbanGIS on Smart Cities and Urban Analytics , SigSpatial, 2015.
4. ​Keyvan R. Moghdam, Quynh Nguyen, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Ugur Demiryurek, “​Traffic Matrix Estimation from Road Sensor Data: A Case Study“, ​ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, SigSpatial 2015.
5. Fan Bai, Keyvan Rezaei Moghadam, and Bhaskar Krishnamachari, “A Tale of Two Cities – Characterizing Social Community Structures of Fleet Vehicles for Modeling V2V Information Dissemination“, IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication and Networking (SECON), 2015.
6. Shangxing Wang, Arman (MHR.) Khouzani, Bhaskar Krishnamachari and Fan Bai, “Optimal Control for Epidemic Routing of Two Files with Different Priorities in Delay Tolerant Networks“, American Control Conferece (ACC), 2015.
7. Yi-Hsuan Kao, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Moo-Ryong Ra and Fan Bai, “Hermes: Latency Optimal Task Assignment for Resource-constrained Mobile Computing“, International Conference on Computer Communication (INFOCOM), 2015.
8. Fan Bai, Keyvan Rezaei Moghadam, and Bhaskar Krishnamachari, “A Tale of Two Cities – Characterizing Social Community Structures of Fleet Vehicles for Modeling V2V Information Dissemination“, IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication and Networking (SECON), 2015.
9. Shangxing Wang, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Nora Ayanian, “The Optimism Principle: A Unified Framework for Optimal Robotic Network Deployment in An Unknown Obstructed Environment“, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2015.
10. Maheswaran Sathiamoorthy, Keyvan Rezaei Moghadam, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, ّFan Bai “Helper Node Allocation Strategies for Content Dissemination in Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks“, IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON), 2014.
11. Quynh Nguyen, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, “Area-Based Dissemination in Vehicular Networks“, Workshop on Cellular Offloading to Opportunistic Networks (CARTOON), IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS), 2014.
12. Richard Kershaw, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, “Evaluation of Seed Selection Strategies for Vehicle to Vehicle Epidemic Information Dissemination“, Workshop on Cellular Offloading to Opportunistic Networks (CARTOON), IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS), 2014.
13. Maheswaran Sathiamoorthy, Alexandros G. Dimakis, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Fan Bai, “Distributed Storage Codes Reduce Latency in Vehicular Networks“, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol.13, no.9, pp.2016-2027, Sept. 2014.
14. Joon Ahn, Maheswaran Sathiamoorthy, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Fan Bai, Lin Zhang, “Optimizing Content Dissemination in Vehicular Networks with Radio Heterogeneity“, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol.13, no.6, pp.1312-1325, June 2014.
15. Joon Ahn, Yi Wang, Bo Yu, Fan Bai, and Bhaskar Krishnamachari, ‘RISA: Distributed Road Information Sharing Architecture‘, “ IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (IEEE INFOCOM 2012), Orlando, FL, USA, March, 2012.
16. Fan Bai and Bhaskar Krishnamachari, ‘Exploiting the wisdom of the crowd: localized, distributed information-centric VANETs‘, IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 48, no. 5, May 2010.

This research area has been supported in part through the generous support of the National Science Foundation and by General Motors Research.
NSF Support for this project was via award number CNS-1217260: NeTS: Small: GOALI: Information Centric Networking on Wheels (IC NoW) – Architecture and Protocols