Search

Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) will change the modes of road safety and traffic management, especially at intersections without traffic lights, namely unsignalized intersections. Existing researches focus on vehicle control within a small area around an unsignalized intersection. This paper expands the control domain to a large area with multiple intersections. In particular, a Multi-intersection Vehicular Cooperative Control (MiVeCC) is proposed to enable cooperation among vehicles in a large area with multiple unsignalized intersections. Firstly, a vehicular end-edge-cloud computing framework is proposed to facilitate end-edge-cloud vertical cooperation and horizontal cooperation among vehicles. Under the framework, a two-stage reinforcement learning is implemented to obtain the optimal policy for vehicle control. To support RL in the proposed framework, a multi-vehicle state representation method and a safety-oriented value representation method are designed. The former structures the collected vehicle information, and the latter evaluates the traffic condition. A multi-intersection simulation platform is developed to evaluate the proposed scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed MiVeCC can improve travel efficiency at multiple intersections by up to 4.59 times without collision compared with benchmark methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern millimeter-wave automotive radars are employed to keep a safe distance between vehicles and reduce the collision risk when driving. Meanwhile, an on-board radar module is supposed to operate in the line-of-sight condition, which limits its sensing capabilities in intersections with obstructed visibility. Therefore, this paper investigates the scheme with passive reflector, enabling the automotive radar to detect an approaching vehicle in the non-line-of-sight (blind) urban intersection. First, extensive radar measurements of the backscattering power are carried out with the in-house assembled millimeter-wave radar equipment. Next, the measured data is employed to calibrate an accurate analytical model, deduced and described in this paper. Finally, the analytical models are deployed to define the optimal parameters of the radar scheme in the particular geometry of the selected intersection scenario. Specifically, it is found that the optimal angular orientation of the reflector is 43.5°, while the 20 m curvature radius shows better performance compared to a flat reflector. Specifically, the curved convex shape increases scattering power by 20 dB in the shadow region and, thus, improves the detection probability of the vehicle, approaching the blind intersection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millimeter-wave vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems with multiple-input multiple-output antenna array have drawn significant attention because it is expected to satisfy the growing bandwidth requirements for the cooperative intelligent transportation systems. However, maintaining high-quality communication links between communicating vehicles without high overhead is a challenging problem due to the high mobility of vehicles. In this paper, we propose a beam management algorithm with spatially distributed antenna subarrays instead of a single co-located antenna array. Unlike existing methods, we use distributed antenna subarrays to exploit the geometric relationship of the beam directions and the relative distance between communicating vehicles. We reduce the beam alignment errors by minimizing the sum of squared errors between the estimated beam direction after the beam training process and the refined beam direction derived from the measured position and velocity data. Additionally, a position data request protocol is devised to reduce the beam refining errors. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed beam management algorithm successfully reduces the beam alignment errors and it is robust to position and velocity measurement errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and microelectromechanical technology-based inertial system (MINS) has become essential in land vehicle navigation systems. In an urban environment, the error of position output by GNSS receiver increases because of the blocking and reflection of the signal by buildings, which affects the positioning accuracy of the integrated system. In order to improve the positioning accuracy under these scenarios, this paper proposed a new robust method based on the estimation of the standard deviation of GNSS positioning error. In our study, a method for estimating the standard deviation ${\boldsymbol{\sigma}}^p$ (or variance) of the position error of GNSS receiver is firstly proposed. Then a robust filtering method combined multi-factor scaling and bias estimation is proposed based on the estimation of ${\boldsymbol{\sigma}}^p$. The simulations and vehicle navigation test show that the proposed method has a robust positioning effect. When ${\boldsymbol{\sigma}}^p$ increases, the position accuracy is closed to the Sage-Husa filtering method with boundary constraint (SH-KF). Simulations also indicate that the proposed method has better robust effect than the traditional Kalman filter and SH-KF when a large bias error of position exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In view of the rapid development of edge computing and vehicular network, edge-assisted vehicular crowdsensing system has brought significant benefits to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). To satisfy the requirements of ITS applications, a substantial number of sensed data are generated continuously, which incurs considerable communication and computation delays. In addition, with fast-moving vehicles and the sheer amount of data, data loss becomes an issue during the process of data uploading. To deal with these challenges, this paper aims to propose a cost-and-quality aware data collection scheme for edge-assisted vehicular crowdsensing system, so as to satisfy the accuracy and timeliness requirements of ITS applications without overloading the network. Particularly, we design a functional architecture for edge-assisted vehicular crowdsensing system, where vehicular sensing, data uploading and sensing parameter adjustment interwork to enable ITS applications. Based on the architecture, two effective algorithms are proposed, which are adaptive clustering and online sensing parameter adjustment. Adaptive clustering algorithm can support reliable and timely data uploading by taking into account the cluster stability and the communication reliability during the process of clustering vehicles. Online sensing parameter adjustment algorithm can guide the actions of intelligent vehicles based on the real-time traffic condition, which can achieve a tradeoff between sensing accuracy and communication overhead. In order to evaluate the performance of our scheme, we develop a simulation platform in which all the components in the system are built. By conducting extensive simulation, the superiority of the proposed scheme is validated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The large-scale application of electric taxis (ETs) in various regions has aroused great interest in developing high-efficiency charging solutions. ETs and charging stations (CSs) can send information to the information management center for real-time information sharing with the technical support of the vehicle-to-grid network. This paper studies the charging problem of intelligent transportation system composed of CSs and networked ETs. Each taxi selects the CS with the lowest charging cost based on the charging price and regional hotspot information. The CS obtains the strategy of taxi and adjusts the charging price to maximize its revenues. We use a multi-leader and multi-follower Stackelberg game to model the interaction between the CSs and ETs. Finally, the hotspot thematic map is generated by using the taxi information of the global positioning system in one day. Simulation results show that the model can effectively reduce the operating cost of taxis and guarantee the revenue of CSs considering the regional hotspot information and reliability coefficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are seeing a growth in the number of connected vehicles in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) to achieve the goal of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). This is leading to a connected vehicular network scenario with vehicles continuously broadcasting data to other vehicles on the road and the roadside network infrastructure. The presence of a large number of communicating vehicles greatly increases the number and types of possible anomalies in the network. Existing works provide solutions addressing specific anomalies in the network only. However, since there can be a multitude of anomalies possible in the network, there is a need for better anomaly detection frameworks that can address this unprecedented scenario. In this paper, we propose an anomaly detection framework for VANETs based on deep neural networks (DNNs) using a sequence reconstruction and thresholding algorithm. In this framework, the DNN architectures are deployed on the roadside units (RSUs) which receive the broadcast vehicular data and run anomaly detection tasks to classify a particular message sequence as anomalous or genuine. Multiple DNN architectures are implemented in this experiment and their performance is compared using key evaluation metrics. Performance comparison of the proposed framework is also drawn against the prior work in this area. Our best performing deep learning-based scheme detects anomalous sequences with an accuracy of 98%, a great improvement over the set benchmark. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To alleviate possible traffic congestion during rush hours, an improved traffic rerouting strategy designed for (or interplayed with) the vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is proposed in this paper. The proposed strategy considers not only the real-time traffic information but also the maximization of road utilization to reach an optimized solution. Furthermore, an alternative path selection is incorporated so that an efficient rerouting path is determined according to the destination of the vehicle, the density and the capacity of the road, and the speed. Via simulations, we can successfully show that our proposed strategy significantly outperforms the closely related strategies in the literature in terms of the travel time, CO $_{2}$ emission, and fuel consumption, in particular, when heavy traffic is involved. Specifically, our proposed strategy can gain up to 20% of reduction in the average travel time in a realistic scenario to be observed later. Additionally, our proposed strategy gains 19% at least of improvement in the case with different road networks and 28.6% at least of improvement in the case with different percentages of reduction of traffic lights as compared to the closely related strategies as shown in the Appendices given in the supplementary downloadable material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last years, more and more research activities have focused on the application of Virtual Reality (VR) and related cutting-edge immersive technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) to vehicular systems for supporting the design of novel Human-Machine Interaction techniques, simulating the functioning of newly developed components, recreating hazardous test environments, establishing trust in Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs), etc. The benefits brought by immersive environments for supporting simulations in the field of vehicular technology have already been recognized by many companies and academic institutions worldwide, as confirmed by the huge investments and a large number of publications. As we approach the time in which immersive simulations will become fundamental for a wide range of applications in the field of vehicular technology, the goal of this Special Section was to attract high-quality submissions reporting state-of-the-art research activities targeted to next-generation vehicles and related infrastructures. The Special Section received 12 submissions, which were prescreened and reviewed by experts in the field. Four papers were ultimately accepted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an antenna synthesis process is investigated for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) application. The wireless communication between Road Side Units (RSUs) and On Board Units (OBUs) located in the vehicles enables smart mobility. However, to support high speed vehicles and high data rates, a wider coverage area by the RSU antennas projected on the highway is required. This is defined by the radiation patterns of the RSU antennas. On a multi-lane highway, interference from the adjacent lanes is a critical issue which determines the communication reliability in terms of Single-to-Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR). Hence, in this paper, an interference-aware antenna synthesis process is proposed and a planar array is optimized based on the objective function of obtaining a wide coverage area in terms of SINR distribution for a given modulation scheme. The proposed antenna array enhances the reliable communication area and provides improved SINR distribution across the lane for misaligned vehicles from the center of the lane. The results indicate that the proposed antenna array performs better than the existing designs in terms of communication reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication has been designed to afford improvements in the traffic congestion and traffic accidents by directly exchanging information between nearby vehicles. However, V2V communication may have difficulty providing service reliability due to interference between V2V links and vehicle-to-cellular user equipment links. In this paper, we consider the transmit power control algorithm to minimize interference among cellular users and vehicles in the context of V2V communication underlaid uplink cellular networks. First, we formulate the problem, which is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem with linear constraints. Addressing this problem with traditional optimization methods is ineffective; therefore, we design and train a deep neural network to address this optimization problem. Computational complexity analyses and simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm outperforms weighted minimum mean squared error (WMMSE), fixed transmit power, and Dinkelbach's methods, and achieves near-global optimum with lower computation complexity than the exhaustive search (ES). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the environment of intelligent and connected vehicles, the information sharing level among vehicles and infrastructure get comprehensively improved. Aiming at the cooperative merging control at highway ramp, we present a two-stage hybrid cooperative control framework considering communication time delays including centralized decision-making for grouping with sequencing and distributed consensus control. The centralized controller is based on a grouping strategy and a cost function for minimizing total travel time and delays and determining the optimal vehicle passage order. Then we model the merging vehicles formation as a multi-agent system, which also could be viewed as a distributed controlling system. Combining with the multi-agent consensus method, it could achieve the desired inter-vehicle distance and speed. The proof tool is the Lyapunov-Krasovskii stability theorem in terms of convergence and formation stability. Finally, we design three simulation scenarios through varying the number of vehicles. Meanwhile, in order to verify the resistance of the algorithm to communication time delays, three conditions with respect to no time delays, heterogeneous time delays, and homogeneous time delays are considered. Simulation result verifies the advantage of the proposed method compared with the Hamilton control method. The efficiency of the proposed method is impervious in three different types of communication time delays and has approximately 30%, 25%, 15% improvement over that of the Hamiltonian method, respectively. Furthermore, the adaptation and effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated under different volumes of traffic flow and communication delays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most researches on the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) in the 5G era are focused on the low latency and the massive transmitted data. However, the 5G base station has relatively a small coverage and a high cost, which is the main reason to hinder the development of the 5G applications on the IoV. In this paper, we try to put forward some feasible solutions for this problem. We will use two physical layer communication techniques, the Coherent Beamforming (CB) technique and the Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) technique, to jointly optimize the throughput of vehicles data transmission and the network infrastructure cost. We first establish the mathematical model based on CB and SIC technology and prove that it cannot be solved directly. Then, we design the Road and CB-nodes Assignment (RCA) algorithm and the Uninstalling Data Scheduling (UDS) algorithm to solve the problem. RCA is based on CB and SIC technology to reasonably arrange CB-nodes, so that CB-nodes set can send data from vehicles to the base station and the base station can receive multiple sets of data at the same time. UDS schedules vehicles based on various factors to optimize the total amount of data transferred by vehicles and improve throughput. In simulations, we conduct some comparative experiments, which are the not using Algorithm 3 scheme, the CB scheme, the SIC scheme, the common scheme and the Relay Task Offloading Scheme in Vehicular Edge Computing algorithm (RVEC Algorithm). Results show that our proposed method has the advantages of cost saving and throughput improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the growing development of Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAV), Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), and 5G communication networks have led to the advent of Autonomous Intersection Management (AIM) systems. AIMs present a new paradigm for CAV control in future cities, taking control of CAVs in scenarios where cooperation is necessary and allowing safe and efficient traffic flows, eliminating traffic signals. So far, the development of AIM algorithms has been based on basic control algorithms, without the ability to adapt or keep learning new situations. To solve this, in this paper we present a new advanced AIM approach based on end-to-end Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL) and trained using Curriculum through Self-Play, called advanced Reinforced AIM (adv.RAIM). adv.RAIM enables the control of CAVs at intersections in a collaborative way, autonomously learning complex real-life traffic dynamics. In addition, adv.RAIM provides a new way to build smarter AIMs capable of proactively controlling CAVs in other highly complex scenarios. Results show remarkable improvements when compared to traffic light control techniques (reducing travel time by 59% or reducing time lost due to congestion by 95%), as well as outperforming other recently proposed AIMs (reducing waiting time by 56%), highlighting the advantages of using MADRL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To commercialize wirelesselectric vehicle charging (WEVC), three critical issues must be resolved: communication between the vehicle assembly (VA) and the ground assembly (GA), metal object detection (MOD) on the GA coil, and position detection (PD) of the VA. This paper proposes a comprehensive system that integrates MOD and PD with VA-GA near-field communication (NFC). A common high-frequency aided carrier is used not only for NFC, but also for MOD and PD. In addition, an array of dual-purpose detection coils is proposed as a sensor for MOD and PD. As a result, the three functions listed above share numerous components and circuits, greatly simplifying the system structure. Furthermore, because the high-frequency aided carrier can operate with or without a power carrier, the preceding three functions are independent of system power status. The proposed method has been validated using a 3.3 kW WEVC prototype operating at 85 kHz. The experimental results show that the proposed system is capable of performing both online and offline NFC, MOD, and PD with high sensitivity while having no impact on wireless charging efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dual-function radar communication (DFRC) is an essential technology in Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Consider that the road-side unit (RSU) employs the DFRC signals to sense the vehicles’ position state information (PSI), and communicates with the vehicles based on PSI. The objective of this paper is to minimize the maximum communication delay among all vehicles by considering the estimation accuracy constraint of the vehicles’ PSI and the transmit power constraint of RSU. By leveraging convex optimization theory, two iterative power allocation algorithms are proposed with different complexities and applicable scenarios. Simulation results indicate that the proposed power allocation algorithm converges and can significantly reduce the maximum transmit delay among vehicles compared with other schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) underpins most intelligent transportation systems and given the open nature of the wireless communication environment, edge nodes in the VANET are subject to varying levels of attacks. While there are a large number of conditional privacy-preserving authentication protocols in the literature, most of these protocols (whose security is guaranteed by classical cryptographic primitives) are not designed to resist quantum attacks. In this paper, we propose a lattice-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication protocol for VANETs, designed to simultaneously achieve mutual authentication and privacy protection. We also show that our protocol is secure in the random oracle model, relying on the small integer solution problem. Additionally, we demonstrate the potential utility of our protocol by evaluating its performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an emerging concept in the intelligent transportation system (ITS), Opportunistic Autonomous Vehicle Platoon (OAVP) enables autonomous vehicles to self-organize a temporary platoon and travel together. Whereas, electing the platoon leader is a crucial issue to be solved in this scenario. The platoon leader not only suffers from more wind resistance but also spends more computation resources in dealing with tremendous information obtained from the surrounding environment. Hence, vehicles tend to be a follower rather than a leader. In this paper, we propose a reputation-based leader election system for OAVP named RLE, which contains two sub-systems: leader election and incentive mechanism. In the former one, a reputation-based election scheme is first constructed to elect a relatively trustful leader according to the reputation value recorded on the blockchain. The proposed scheme integrates previous experience with recommendations from other members. In the second sub-system, an incentive mechanism is designed to stimulate platoon members to participate actively in the process of election, which is based on the recorded real-time fuel economy among vehicles participating in a platoon. Security analysis shows that the system is sufficient to deal with potential security threats. Experimental results based on the simulated platform demonstrate the practicality and feasibility of our solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identification of communication parameters, a major task of intelligent receivers, has important applications in intelligent systems, especially cognitive radio systems. Multiple antennas make the identification problem more challenging. In this paper, we focus on the problem of detecting the number of transmit antennas in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cognitive radio systems. A novel identification algorithm is proposed to determine the number of transmit antennas for MIMO systems in the presence of alpha-stable noise. We first introduce the correlation matrix based on the fractional lower order statistics (FLOS) and provide a particular structure of FLOS-based correlation matrix. Then, the eigenvalues of the FLOS-based correlation matrix are employed to construct a test statistic and the central limit theorem is exploited to obtain the decision threshold. Finally, the transmit-antenna number is detected using a serial binary hypothesis test. Simulation results are demonstrated to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed transmit-antenna number detection algorithm for MIMO systems in the presence of alpha-stable noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications is an important technology in vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) to support autonomous data exchange among vehicles. Multiple V2V communications modes have been investigated for VANET, including dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) based on IEEE 802.11p and LTE-V2X, which are suitable for different packet transmission cases. In order to fully exploit the strengths of various modes, hybrid V2V communications strategies are designed in this paper, where each vehicle is allowed to choose different modes for different kinds of transmissions in separate frequency bands for transmission throughput improvement. Furthermore, since it is usually impractical to decide all the vehicles’ communications strategies globally due to high computational complexity and heavy overhead to broadcast the decisions, we model the selection of hybrid V2V communications strategies for vehicles as an evolutionary game. A strategy selection algorithm is then proposed, where each vehicle can select its hybrid V2V communications strategy locally based on its evaluation of the payoffs for different strategies and limited signalling from the base station. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can converge to an asymptotic stable state, which can improve the transmission throughput of vehicles, and is robust to the slight evaluation errors of payoffs and the strategy mutations of a few vehicles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicles on the road, where an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is built, can share a lot of traffic information and drive more safely and efficiently through data sharing. Since incorrect information misleads vehicles and causes confusion in traffic, a vehicular trust model is needed to check the message’s trustworthiness while considering the vehicle’s properties and protecting its privacy. In this paper, we proposed a two layered blockchain-based reputation system, which consists of a local one-day message blockchain and a global vehicle reputation blockchain. It can administrate the reputation score securely and preserve the vehicle’s partial privacy. The proposed model efficiently manages local traffic information through the local one-day blockchain, reducing the memory overhead of vehicles. As the vehicle’s actual identity and activities in other areas are hidden by using one-time public keys, partial privacy of the vehicle is preserved. According to the activity of the vehicle, the vehicle’s reputation score is updated and stored permanently in the global reputation blockchain. We also suggested the location-based practical byzantine fault tolerance (LPBFT), a new consensus algorithm for fast block generating. The LPBFT lowers message propagation time through location-based primary node selection and is about 1.4 times faster than existing PBFT. The simulation results show the efficiency and the feasibility of LPBFT and our proposed protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving the efficiency of traffic signal control is an effective way to alleviate traffic congestion at signalized intersections. To achieve effective management of the system-wide traffic flows, current research tends to focus on applying reinforcement learning (RL) techniques for collaborative traffic signal control in a traffic road network. However, the existing collaboration-based methods often ignore the impact of transmission delay for exchanging traffic flow information on the system. Most of the studies assume that the signal controllers can collect all instantaneous vehicular features without delay. To fill the gap, we propose an RL-based cooperative traffic signal control scheme considering the data transmission delay issue in a traffic road network. In this paper, we (1) design our new RL agents to cooperatively control the traffic signals by improving the reward and state representation based on the state-of-the-art max-pressure control theory; (2) propose a traffic state prediction method to address the data transmission delay issue by decreasing the discrepancy between the real-time and delayed traffic conditions; (3) evaluated the performance of our proposed work on both synthetic and real-world scenarios with a different range of data transmission delays. The results demonstrate that our method surpassed the performance of the previous max-pressure-based traffic signal control methods and addressed the data transmission delay issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid growth in Autonomous Vehicle (AV) technology endeavors increased attention towards road safety in recent days. Particularly, a higher number of road accidents occurs when the AV tries to overtake or change the lane. To cut down the number of accidents and improve traffic reliability, the AV should be capable of making intelligent decisions and communicating those to other AVs. Therefore, in this paper, a Cooperative Collision avoidance scheme for AVs at Overtaking and Lane Changing maneuver (CCAV-OLC) is proposed. The Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) in the CCAV-OLC scheme, processes on the given number of expert demonstrations for automatically acquiring the reward function, and thereby imitating actual human driving strategy and decisions. However, the adaptability of IRL to a high-dimensional AV environment restricts the performance of the CCAV-OLC scheme. To overcome this, the IRL in CCAV-OLC leverages the Gaussian Process (GP) regression model (IRL-GP), which enables data-efficient Bayesian prediction even when the number of demonstrations is very low. After taking intelligent decisions in overtaking and lane changing maneuvers, the AVs cooperatively communicate and exchange the decisions with each other by 6th Generation Vehicle-to-Everything (6G-V2X) communications, which further improves the accuracy and lessens the time taken for making optimal decisions. The experimental results show that the AVs clone the expert's optimal driving strategy and avoid the collisions to a greater extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) envisions the promising technology of future Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). However, the complex road structures and increased vehicles cause traffic congestion and road safety, which eventually leads to horrible accidents. Cooperative driving of AVs, a groundbreaking initiative of vehicle platooning, epitomizes the next wave in vehicular technology through minimizing accident risks, transport times, costs, energy, and fuel consumption. However, the traditional machine learning-based platooning approaches fail to regulate the policy with the dynamic feature of AVs. This paper proposes a hybrid Deep Reinforcement learning and Genetic algorithm for Smart-Platooning (DRG-SP) the AVs. The leverage of the deep reinforcement learning mechanism addresses the computational complexity and accommodates the high dynamic platoon environments. Adopting the Genetic Algorithm in Deep Reinforcement learning overcomes the slow convergence problem and offers long-term performance. The simulation results reveal that the Smart-Platooning effectively forms and maintains the platoons by minimizing traffic congestion and fuel consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) improve driving experience and safety through secure Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) that satisfy strict security and performance constraints. Relevant standards, such as the IEEE 1609.2, prescribe network-efficient cryptographic protocols to reduce communication latencies through a combination of the Elliptic Curve Qu-Vanstone (ECQV) implicit certificate scheme and the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). However, literature lacks open implementations and performance evaluations for vehicular systems. This paper assesses the applicability of IEEE 1609.2 and of ECQV and ECDSA schemes to C-ITSs. We release an open implementation of the standard ECQV scheme to benchmark its execution time on automotive-grade boards. Moreover, we evaluate its performance in real road and traffic scenarios and show that compliance with strict latency requirements defined for C-ITS requires computational resources that are not met by many automotive-grade embedded hardware platforms. As a final contribution, we propose and evaluate novel heuristics to reduce the number of signatures to be verified in real C-ITS scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While bringing convenience to people, the growing number of vehicles already on roads causes inevitable traffic congestion. Traffic congestion can happen for both observable reasons, such as accidents, or occur naturally due to human driving style in high vehicles density scenarios. In the latter case, traffic congestion are referred to as phantom jams. To alleviate the traffic instability caused by phantom jams, bilateral control models have been proposed with the development of intelligent transportation system (ITS) in ideal situations. However, in road scenarios, some factors that severely affect the performance of existing models cannot be ignored, such as uncertainties of vehicle state measurements caused by on-board sensors, time delay caused by intervehicle communications and control systems of vehicles. In this paper, a novel predictable bilateral control model (PBCM) with local wireless communication, which consists of best estimation and state prediction, is proposed to accurately control the host vehicle in traffic flow to alleviate traffic instability. Compared with other models, theoretical analysis and simulation results show that more accurate control decisions could be obtained with the PBCM, which could distribute all vehicles more evenly, and our model could maintain higher velocities when disturbances occurred. The experimental results also reveal that our proposed model could more effectively suppress traffic instability (i.e., the improvement in control decision $a$ is more than 10%) and could restore traffic balance 20% faster than other models on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of commercial and civilian vehicles equipped with automotive radars is expected to rise rapidly in the forthcoming years and with that comes the problem of increased mutual interference between the radar sensors, which can result in severely reduced radar sensitivity and increased false alarm rates. The difficulty and complexity of the problem increase with MIMO radar systems and multiply even further with a growing number of vehicles present on the scene. A system of connected vehicles can efficiently address this problem by sharing information amongst themselves. In this paper, we propose an efficient waveform design algorithm that seeks to minimize a collective cross-ambiguity function. Vehicles that can talk to each other, can perform the design online in a collaborative manner, or offline, in which case the radar codes can be designed and stored in a codebook for future use. The proposed coding scheme is computationally efficient for practical use and the incorporation of such schemes requires only a slight modification of the existing systems. Our numerical examples indicate that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the interference power level in a desired area of the radar cross-ambiguity functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Featuring unprecedentedly high data rates and high connection densities, 3GPP New Radio (NR) vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications have been regarded as the most promising remedy to support the next generation driving use cases. For this purpose, although dedicated bands on 5.9 GHz spectrum have been allocated for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), the limited bandwidth may not afford the desired service requirements. This engineering concern thus drives the utilization of unlicensed bands on 5 GHz spectrum adjacent to the ITS bands. However, subject to the fairness constraint in sharing unlicensed spectrum, various communication regulations have been imposed, and four different types of multi-band channel access procedures are consequently developed both in 3GPP LTE-A Licensed-Assisted Access (LAA) and NR on unlicensed spectrum (NR-U), to lead to a phenomenon that occupying more unlicensed bands may not suggest a proportional growth in the throughput. To empower high-throughout and high-density V2X communications, in this paper, we consequently propose the optimum channel access strategies for each V2X transmitter to decide the optimum number of unlicensed bands to access. To this end, analytic models for four types of multi-band channel access procedures in 3GPP NR-U are provided, which capture both inter-system and intra-system interference from coexisting WiFi transmitters and V2X transmitters. Subsequently, game-theoretically optimum strategies for each type of multi-band channel access procedures are derived. Performance evaluation results fully demonstrate the optimality of the proposed strategies, to serve the urgent demands in supporting the next generation driving use cases on unlicensed spectrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the problem of improving vehicle stability using an electronic limited slip differential (ELSD). Unlike brake-based vehicle stability control systems, electronic limited slip differentials have the potential to control a vehicle's yaw stability without slowing down its speed. In this study, first, an ELSD model is designed to properly predict ELSD torque distribution. The model's accuracy is evaluated using experimental test data. Then, an intelligent ELSD control design is proposed using the developed ELSD model, capable of working in both off-throttle and on-throttle scenarios. The proposed design, which is based on a model predictive control approach, offers control of the ELSD differential by directly controlling the ELSD clutch pressure. This control design enables the controller to prevent unwanted oversteering yaw moments and avoid chattering in the ELSD clutch. The controller is implemented in a Cadillac CTS vehicle to evaluate its performance experimentally in various driving maneuvers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicles share information via Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) that is considered the foundation of the intelligent transportation system. Access control from functional encryption (FE) allows secure sharing over encrypted data with both utilization and privacy. However, low-powerful vehicles and the untrusted server incurs that FE-based access control mechanisms are less practical with client-side inefficiency and access unreliability. In this work, we put forth ORAC, an Optimized encrypted Access Control system with partial privacy and Reliability. ORAC is built on top of functional encryption that guarantees data partial privacy and data utilization in VANET, and separates the data access into the offline phase and the online phase, such that most of decryption computation could be done in the offline phase and vehicles could execute the real decryption efficiently. By embedding blockchain transactions into identity records and data storage, ORAC protects data accessed by vehicles from tampering and thereby manages data transfers with high reliability. It can be instantiated directly from pairing-based assumptions and features only the decryption complexity of two exponentiation and two multiplication operations. We give a formal security proof of the instantiation in the semantic security model. We also prototype our scheme by implementing ORAC over Ethereum with two types of smart contracts and the evaluation can demonstrate its efficiency optimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of internet of vehicles, both the traffic signal control and the rerouting of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) are essential techniques to alleviate traffic congestion and improve traffic efficiency. However, these two schemes have been treated separately without a unified framework allowing for joint optimization in the previous studies. In the case of traffic congestion at the bottleneck intersections, either of the two schemes alone is not enough. To this end, we propose to jointly control the traffic lights and the CAVs under the reinforcement learning (RL) framework. To lower the dimensionality of this learning problem, we propose to control the route choices of the CAVs through a few common scalar parameters instead of controlling the CAVs individually. In particular, the rerouting ratios are dynamically adjusted. A model-based method is further proposed to estimate the expected travel time with reduced estimation error. We then exploit the tools from deep RL and put forth an efficient algorithm that is able to control the green time allocation of traffic signals and the rerouting of CAVs jointly. Comprehensive numerical experiments demonstrate the validity of our proposed models and show the traffic efficiency can be significantly improved with our proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote keyless entry systems have penetrated the vehicular market due to its convenience. However, its vulnerability against relay attacks exploiting the wireless channel is a serious threat. One of the prominent countermeasures is radio ranging between the key fob and the vehicle. Taking into account radio regulations, usability and power consumption among other things, a suitable approach is necessary to devise. This article proposes sub-GHz two-way ranging based on phase detection which offers high tolerance against reference clock offset between a pair of transceiver devices and a novel compensation scheme against multipath effects. We present the operation principle and theoretical performance under a two-path model of radio propagation and additive white Gaussian noise. In field experiments with prototype devices, the ranging accuracy is validated. We show that the proposed ranging produces sufficient performance for remote keyless entry systems, confirming if the key fob is within a few meters of the vehicle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of transportation and the ever-improving of vehicular technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been popularized in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), especially in Traffic Flow Prediction (TFP). TFP plays an increasingly important role in alleviating traffic pressure caused by regional emergencies and coordinating resource allocation in advance to deployment decisions. However, existing research can hardly model the original intricate structural relationships of the transportation network (TN) due to the lack of in-depth consideration of the dynamic relevance of spatial, temporal, and periodic characteristics. Motivated by this and combined with deep learning (DL), we propose a novel framework entitled Fully Dynamic Self-Attention Spatio-Temporal Graph Networks (FDSA-STG) by improving the attention mechanism using Graph Attention Networks (GATs). In particular, to dynamically integrate the correlations of spatial dimension, time dimension, and periodic characteristics for highly-accurate prediction, we correspondingly devised three components including the spatial graph attention component (SGAT), the temporal graph attention component (TGAT), and the fusion layer. In this case, three groups of similar structures are designed to extract the flow characteristics of recent periodicity, daily periodicity, and weekly periodicity. Extensive evaluation results show the superiority of FDSA-STG from perspectives of prediction accuracy and prediction stability improvements, which also testifies high model adaptability to the dynamic characteristics of the actual observed traffic flow (TF). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic congestion alleviation around intersections has been a growing challenge, and a competent traffic signal control scheme plays a pivotal role in intelligent transportation systems. Recent studies using deep reinforcement learning techniques have shown promising results for traffic signal control, but they only focus on extracting features from traffic conditions of isolated or adjacent intersections. In this work, we employed navigation information for traffic signal control, greatly enriching the features for traffic signal control with deep reinforcement learning. In addition, we are the first to propose a novel scheme DeepNavi to exploit the temporal-spatial relations from numerous navigation routes and extract dynamic real-time and future traffic features. We tested our scheme on a challenging real-world traffic dataset with 16 intersections in a residential district of Hangzhou, China. Extensive experiments were conducted and the results demonstrated that our DeepNavi scheme achieves superior performance over five popular and state-of-the-art baseline methods on different metrics, including queue length, speed, travel time and accumulative waiting time. In addition, with our method, vehicles suffer the least red lights and enjoy the most green waves, which further validates that our scheme greatly relieves the congestion and provides excellent experience for drivers. Simulations with different penetration levels of navigation routes showed that even with only part of navigation routes available in the traffic network, our scheme can obtain superior performance, further demonstrating the effectiveness and feasibility of DeepNavi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio-based vehicular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) aims to localize vehicles while mapping the landmarks in the environment. We propose a sequence of three Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture (PMBM) based SLAM filters, which handle the entire SLAM problem in a theoretically optimal manner. The complexity of the three proposed SLAM filters is progressively reduced while sustaining high accuracy by deriving SLAM density approximation with the marginalization of nuisance parameters (either vehicle state or data association). Firstly, the PMBM SLAM filter serves as the foundation, for which we provide the first complete description based on a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter. Secondly, the Poisson multi-Bernoulli (PMB) SLAM filter is based on the standard reduction from PMBM to PMB, but involves a novel interpretation based on auxiliary variables and a relation to Bethe free energy. Finally, using the same auxiliary variable argument, we derive a marginalized PMB SLAM filter, which avoids particles and is instead implemented with a low-complexity cubature Kalman filter. We evaluate the three proposed SLAM filters in comparison with the probability hypothesis density (PHD) SLAM filter in 5G mmWave vehicular networks and show the computation-performance trade-off between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic safety at road intersections can be enhanced by improving opportunistic exchange of safety messages between vehicles. In urban intersection scenario, obstacles such as buildings and road side installations/signboards block the line-of-sight communication between vehicles. In order to enhance the reliability of communication link, the existing vehicular solution utilizes relay placement at road intersection. However, as the vehicular density increases, the existing vehicular-radio frequency (V-RF) communication with relaying tends to suffer from higher interference, lower packet reception rate, and longer communication delays due to channel congestion. In contrast to the existing solutions, we propose to use practical deployment strategies namely hybrid vehicular-visible light communication (V-VLC)/V-RF with relaying and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided V-RF solutions to improve the communication range for urban vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. We present stochastic geometry based analytical framework to analyze the performance of proposed solutions in terms of outage probability, throughput and delay outage rate (DOR). Numerical results illustrate that the proposed solutions can achieve considerable performance improvement in outage, throughput while ensuring low latency as compared to conventional V-RF with relaying. These deployment strategies may also serve as a preferred alternative for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) to meet ultra-high reliable and ultra-low latency communication for beyond 5 G (B5G) vehicular networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is vital for supporting intelligent transport systems, such as traffic data sharing and cooperative processing in the modern city. However, data security and privacy are the critical factors restricting the development. To address these challenges, several certificateless conditional privacy-preserving authentication (CPPA) schemes with anonymity and traceability have been proposed. These schemes avoid complicated certificate management in the PKI framework and key escrow in the ID-based protocol. However, there still exist drawbacks such as computational complexity, high communication cost or security vulnerability. Recently, Ali et al. proposed an efficient certificateless CPPA (CLCPPA) scheme for VANETs, but we have found that this scheme fails to resist a signature forgery attack. To achieve a trade-off between security and efficiency, we first demonstrate the insecurity of Ali et al.’s protocol and then introduce a security-enhanced solution. To show the feasibility and utility of our proposal, we perform a security analysis in the security model. Moreover, we evaluate the performance via comparing it with other existing schemes. From the comparison results, we can find that our scheme is more efficient than prior state-of-art solutions, in terms of signing (improving 66.75%), the verification (improving 33.19%) and bandwidth requirement (reducing 14.75%). Therefore, our proposal is more suitable to be applied in VANETs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automotive radar is a critical feature in advanced driver-assistance systems. It is important in enhancing vehicle safety by detecting the presence of other vehicles in the vicinity. The performance of radar detection is, however, affected by the interference from radars of other vehicles as well as the variation in the target radar cross-section (RCS) due to varying physical features of the target vehicle. Considering such interference and random RCS, this work provides a fine-grained performance analysis of radar detection. Specifically, using stochastic geometry, we calculate the meta distribution of the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio that permits the reliability analysis of radar detection at individual vehicles. We also evaluate the delay aspect of radar detection, namely, the mean local delay which is the average number of transmission attempts needed until the first successful target detection. For a given target distance, we obtain the optimal transmit probability that maximizes the density of successful detection while keeping the mean local delay below a threshold. We also provide several system design insights in terms of the fraction of reliable radar links, transmission delay, the density of vehicles, and congestion control. Finally, leveraging the derived framework, we present an online algorithm to select the transmit probability in a distributed manner, particularly when system parameters such as vehicular density and interferer locations are unknown to individual vehicles. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed online framework for selecting the optimal transmit probability within a deadline of 0.1 ms, which is critical for sustaining automotive safety applications and services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-driving vehicles are posing new challenges as the automation level defined in the SAE International standards for autonomous driving is increased. A pivotal task in autonomous driving is building a perception of the surrounding environment using optical sensors, which is a long-standing challenge and prompts us to explore the utilization of various sensors. Radar is an older and cheaper type of sensor than alternatives such as lidar for long-range distance coverage, and it is also competitively reliable and robust in adverse weather conditions. However, sparse data and noise are inherent challenges of radar. This study explores the dynamic Gaussian process for occupancy mapping and predicting a drivable path for a self-driving vehicle within the field of view (FOV) of a radar sensor. Gaussian occupancy mapping does not need abundant data for training and is a promising alternative to data-reliant deep learning techniques. The proposed technique optimizes parameters (variational and kernel-based) of the Gaussian process to determine the allowed region within the FOV limits by means of stochastic selection of functional points (pseudoinput) and tuning of threshold values. We have tested the proposed technique in experiments performed under different environmental conditions, such as various road and traffic conditions and diverse weather and illumination conditions. The results verify the efficacy of the proposed technique in diverse weather conditions for finding a drivable path for a self-driving vehicle, with the additional benefits of requiring only a low-cost apparatus and providing coverage of a long distance range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar, enabled by millimeter-wave virtual MIMO techniques, provides great promises to the high-resolution automotive sensing and target detection in unmanned ground/aerial vehicles (UGA/UAV). As a long-established problem, however, existing subspace methods suffer from either high complexity or low accuracy. In this work, we propose two efficient methods, to accomplish fast subspace computation and accurate angle of arrival (AoA) acquisition. By leveraging randomized low-rank approximation, our fast multiple signal classification (MUSIC) methods, relying on random sampling and projection techniques, substantially accelerate the subspace estimation by orders of magnitude. Moreover, we establish the theoretical bounds of our proposed methods, which ensure the accuracy of the approximated pseudo-spectrum. As demonstrated, the pseudo-spectrum acquired by our fast-MUSIC would be highly precise; and the estimated AoA is almost as accurate as standard MUSIC. In contrast, our new methods are tremendously faster than standard MUSIC. Thus, our fast-MUSIC enables the high-resolution real-time environmental sensing with massive MIMO radars, which has great potential in the emerging unmanned systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) plays an indispensable role in intelligent transportation system (ITS). When the vehicle density is high, the performance of IoV suffers due to the broadcast storm problem. To address this issue, we propose a novel clustering approach using behavioral parameters and a current journey parameter. In this approach, we first calculate a cluster fitness score (CFS) for each vehicle in the network and select a vehicle with the highest CFS as a cluster head (CH). The CH then arranges two forms of communications which are contention free communication (CFC) and contention-based communication (CBC). In CFC, each cluster member (CM) broadcasts periodically without contending the channel access. However, in CBC, communicating parties like roadside units (RSUs), cluster heads (CHs), cluster members (CMs), and other vehicles contend to get the channel access. The contention window of CMs is also adapted to improve IoV performance. Additionally, our approach facilitates partitioning into sub-clusters and merging of sub-clusters based on the travel direction. Finally, we present the simulation results to demonstrate the improved performance of IoV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With powerful storage and computation capability, vehicular edge computing is considered as a promising paradigm to enhance the safety and quality-of-service of vehicles in intelligent transportation systems. In this work, we investigate a joint road side units (RSUs) selection and resource allocation problem, with the objective of minimizing the total task offloading delay subject to the bandwidth and computation resources constraints, in non-collaborative and collaborative RSU scenarios. For the former, as the formulated problem is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, we re-formulate the original problem into a convex one and then decompose it into a distributed manner. By utilizing the alternating direction method of multipliers, we propose a joint RSUs selection and resource allocation (JRSRA) algorithm. For the collaborative RSU scenarios, we transform the problem into a convex optimization problem by linearization, and propose a joint resource allocation based branch and bound (JRABB) algorithm to solve the total task offloading delay minimization problem. Simulation results show that the proposed JRSRA and JRABB algorithms can reduce the total task offloading delay compared with other benchmark methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An electronic toll collection (ETC) system is one of the most important parts of an intelligent transportation system (ITS), but existing ETC systems are not efficient and have vehicle fee evasion complications. Owing to the traceability and tamper resistance of a blockchain, the combination of a blockchain and ETC system is a feasible way to solve the above problems. However, traditional blockchain (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum) has high power consumption and low efficiency. Hence, it cannot be used in ETC systems with high throughput and is not suitable for power-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In this study, therefore, we propose a blockchain architecture for the ETC system. To curb vehicle fee evasion behavior, thereby reducing the economic loss caused, we propose a vehicle behavior management mechanism based on credit value. Furthermore, to reduce the burden of storage and build a chain of evidence for auditing purposes, we propose an evidence chain framework. To protect the data security in the transaction process, we designed a data protection method to encrypt the transaction data. Additionally, this system is based on an open-source alliance blockchain framework called Hyperledger Fabric, which is more in line with the current application scenarios of ETC systems. We implemented the system on a Raspberry Pi and carried out simulations. The comprehensive evaluation results and analysis show that the system effectively reduces the number of illegal acts, completes the evidence inspection, and improves the security of the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an emerging technology, cloud-based Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) can significantly improve the efficiency of transportation systems by alleviating traffic congestion and optimizing resource management. However, since the information transmitted in VANET is distributed in an open-access environment, security and privacy are now becoming vital concerns, especially when attackers own more and more resources. Recently, many tamper-proof devices (TPD)-based authentication schemes have been proposed to tackle the above-mentioned challenges, while most of them are dependent on ideal TPDs with very strong security assumptions. Moreover, when the aggregate signature verification fails, these schemes can do nothing but discard the aggregate signature completely, which makes them impractical in VANET. To address the above concerns, we propose a more realistic TPD-based authentication scheme with privacy-preserving features for cloud-based VANET. Specifically, the off-line self-updating method is utilized to update the data in TPD periodically to resist side-channel attacks. Furthermore, an efficient fine-grained error location algorithm is designed to quickly detect all invalid signatures within a problematic aggregate signature scenario. Our performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing ones in terms of security, computation delay and communication overhead, thus more suitable in practical cloud-based VANET environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) are Not-So-Futuristic. CAVs will be highly dynamic by intelligently exploiting multipath communication over several radio technologies, such as high-speed WiFi and 5G and beyond networks. Yet, the likelihood of data communication loss can be very high and/, or packets arrive at the destination not in correct working order due to erratic and mixed time-varying wireless links. Furthermore, the vehicular data traffic is susceptible to loss and delay variation, which recommends the need to investigate new multipath TCP (MPTCP) protocols for ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC) over such heterogeneous networks while reassuring CAVs’ needs. We undertake the challenge by jointly considering network coding and balanced linked adaptation for performing coupled congestion control across multiple wireless paths. Consequently, the proposed low delay MPTCP framework for connecting autonomous vehicles is efficient and intelligent by design. We conduct a rigorous convergence analysis of the MPTCP design framework. In summation, we provide a detailed mathematical study and demonstrate that the latency penalty for the URLLC-MPTCP developed over these networks becomes negligible when considering the possible benefits that multiple network convergence could offer. Our extensive emulation results demonstrate all these lucrative features of URLLC-MPTCP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]