NeTS: Small: Proof-of-Concept Study on an Emerging Mobile Data Transportation Network

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The mandate of the US Department of Transportation (DoT) on light-weight vehicles to be equipped with communication capability for intelligent traffic control and safe driving results in a tremendous interest in developing connected vehicles (CV) technology. However, US DoT has not specified what kinds of communication devices with what level of capability are to be installed. Under the premise that more powerful communication devices with higher computational capability and more storage capacity are deployed in vehicles, this project aims to carry out a proof-of-concept study on this emerging network consisting of vehicles with powerful devices. By considering "unlimited" power supplies from vehicles and relatively "regular" vehicular mobility, the project seeks to demonstrate that vehicles with such more powerful capability offer an emerging viable data transportation network to complement existing telecommunications systems. The proposed research potentially leads to further development of innovative technologies in leveraging vehicles to transport exponentially increasing data traffic from various emerging Internet of Things (IoT) systems and smart cities applications. Specifically, this one-year project aims to demonstrate how to leverage light-weight vehicles equipped with powerful cognitive radio (CR) routers with high computational capability and relatively large storage capacity to perform spectrum sensing, processing and storing data, making intelligent decisions, and opportunistically transporting data for emerging IoT systems and smart cities applications. To achieve this goal, the project plans to design a flexible and agile cognitive network architecture to effectively take advantage of the added capability in vehicles. Under this architecture, a suite of spectrum management mechanisms will be developed from both access point of view and end-to-end service perspective. Delay-tolerant traffic will shift to this emerging network where harvested licensed or unlicensed spectrum can be used to opportunistically store-carry-forward data traffic. By designing various kinds of opportunistic data offloading mechanisms, the project seeks to explore the effectiveness of such a data transportation network.