Cost-Effective Vehicular Communication Networking

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Vehicular communication networks are envisioned to support various applications for road safety, smart transportation, in-vehicle Internet access, and location dependent services. The paradigm has received strong support from government agencies (especially in allocating radio spectrum), academia, and industry in both telecommunication and automotive sectors. The highly dynamic network topology with intermittent links, due to high user mobility, not only poses significant technical challenges in network operation and service provisioning, but also potentially offers new opportunities for networking solutions to achieve performance optimization. As a result, significant R&D efforts are required to ensure efficient and reliable end-to-end information delivery via both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure multi-hop connections. The long-term goal of this research program is to develop innovative cost-effective wireless networking solutions for delivering broadband Internet services to users in vehicles. The short-term objectives in the next five years are to study fundamental issues in vehicular networking, to establish new mathematical models to capture network dynamics, and to gain an in-depth understanding of network performance trade-offs. In particular, we consider a heterogeneous networking paradigm, where the wireless network infrastructure includes cellular networks and roadside WiFi networks. We focus on cost-effective downlink Internet data services to vehicle users, in terms of per-user throughput per unit cost for the network infrastructure deployment and operation. The research includes three thrusts: (1) Network capacity and service delay analysis - We will develop a cost-effective networking architecture for vehicle users to access the Internet, via establishing fundamental relations between network capacity, average service delay, and infrastructure deployment and operation cost; (2) Cooperative drive-thru access - Vehicles on a road segment form a linear cluster and can cooperatively download contents from the Internet via WiFi access points upon consecutive drive-thru. We will develop a cooperative WiFi drive-thru communication framework to maximize the data volume delivered to vehicle users, taking account of temporal and spatial dynamics in vehicle traffic density, randomness in user mobility and radio propagation channels; (3) Opportunistic WiFi offloading - We will establish an interworking framework between WiFi and cellular networks for opportunistic data traffic offloading from cellular networks to WiFi networks, while satisfying service quality requirements. The framework should take advantage of vehicle high speed in coping with the service coverage gaps between neighboring WiFi access points.The research outcomes are expected to have a profound scientific, technological, and social impact, in providing in-depth understanding and guidelines for developing cost-effective vehicular networking algorithms and protocols, and in providing many potential new on-road services and applications. This research program will train a large pool of highly qualified personnel, providing the trainees with valuable knowledge and research experiences in wireless networking, and enabling them to emerge as expert additions to the Canadian high technology industry labor force.