A Scalable Vehicular Network Architecture for Traffic Information Sharing

BY MEGHNA DAS

071/EC/10

ECE 1 (4th Year)

Abstract

Traffic Information system basically consists of units for vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to roadside (V2R) communication as a part of intelligent transportation systems. Most existing V2V and V2R systems work based on peer-to-peer (P2P) network technology using a clustering based architecture. We study the scenario of a metropolitan area, with a large number of data sources and prove that clustering based architecture does not work with the heavy traffic load at each node. We propose a proxy based scalable architecture, wherein the data download traffic at each node is proved to keep constant even when the network size grows

Introduction
Vehicular Networking as a part of intelligent transportation system is an emerging network that can be very effective in in improving road safety and transportation efficiency There are two types of major communication nodes in vehicular networks Roadside Units (RSUs) and On Board Units (OBUs) - Both work in the dedicated short range communications (DSRC) frequency band at 5.9 GHz Two operational modes Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) - collision warning, broadcasting of accident info. Vehicle to Roadside (V2R) Traffic information collection from multiple data sources, we focus on the V2R mode for traffic info services in a metropolitan area.

Preference of P2P network technology over Traditional client-server based architecture

Serious scalability issues occur in client-server architecture since the demand on the processing ability and communication bandwidth of the central server grows rapidly as the number of vehicles increase.

On the other hand, P2P network leverages the large number of RSUs with limited processing and communication ability to support many applications without the need of a central server

Limitations of P2P Technology

We use a P2P multicast technique generally in vehicular networking which is used in applications like video streaming, voice/video conferencing etc. However, in the above applications, only a small number of peers need to fetch data from a limited number of sources In vehicular networks, a large number of customers may require data from a large number of sources and hence scalability issues may occur.

Background

ABOUT P2P NETWORKS

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Regular nodes with limited processing ability and bandwidth act as RELAYS for other nodes to obtain data and can be a beneficiary of relaying service as well. Eg. Static File sharing (movies etc.) In Traffic info sharing, data is dynamic and continuously updated (unlike movies) and the data sources are more varied. Hence P2P multicast, also called application layer multicast, is used.

Background
PROPOSED P2P MULTICAST STRUCTURE

Clustering Based Architecture The nodes in a network are divided into multiple clusters, with size of each cluster between K and 3K, where K is a constant. Cluster heads can for a new cluster at a higher layer; this continues till a hierarchical structure is formed. - The control overhead for maintaining customer status is reduced - A multicast tree can be built on top of an existing hierarchical structure
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Basic Model
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RSUs are employed as the peers to forward data to each other. Vehicles obtain the current traffic info of their routes through an RSU within its communication range When the vehicles moves to another location, it switches to a different RSU. The vehicle sends its requests to this new RSU to keep receiving the data it needs. RSUs also autonomously form P2P networks to download data among each other

Scalability of Existing architecture

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Handling Data download The load of data download should be ideally kept constant and should not grow too fast with increase in customers and data sources Data processing A scheme where the multicast tree is rebuilt every time a node is added or where the multicast tree grows fast with the number of nodes is not scalable Overhead control Managing of departure and joining of peer nodes should not incur too much of maintenance cost

Scalability of Existing architecture

A)

The Basic Clustering based Architecture If the clustering based architecture is directly deployed for the trafc information sharing application, each data request will be routed through one or multiple layers of cluster heads.

The clustering based architecture is essentially a tree, with the customer nodes and source nodes being the leaf nodes, and the cluster head being the branch nodes.
Each request from a customer is forwarded by the cluster heads to the corresponding source along the hierarchical structure. The requested data is sent back along the same path to the customer.

Scalability Analysis on Existing architecture

B) The fusion based clustering architecture The basic clustering architecture analyzed above could be improved by considering data request fusion at each cluster head. The data requests are fused (i.e. the requests for the same data source from nodes in a cluster could be merged into a single request) at the cluster heads, and sent to the source nodes through higher layer cluster heads or even the root when necessary. Compared with the basic clustering based architecture, the fusion based clustering architecture could help reduce the data download traffic significantly.

However, in both the cases, the signal traffic and the data download traffic at the root node grows linearly with the data sources. This is not scalable in case of a possible large number of data sources. Even when the fusion of data requests is applied, the clustering based architecture still causes serious scalability problem in terms of data download. The main reason behind is that the same cluster head is used repeatedly for forwarding data for different data sources

Proposed Proxy Based Scalable Architecture

Each cluster head still collects and fuses data requests from all nodes in its cluster, but instead of using a fixed cluster head to process data requests and downloads, we can assign a different node in a cluster to forward data for each data source. At the first layer, a cluster head designates a customer node from its cluster to act as the proxy for distributing data for this source later. This proxy node becomes the virtual cluster head at layer one for the specific source node.

To enable this virtual cluster head to forward data to the original customers who request the data, the fixed cluster head at layer one transfers information on all other nodes in this cluster that request data from the same source to its virtual cluster head
The proxy information is forwarded to its cluster head. The higher layer cluster head further fuses the proxy information, and updates the virtual cluster head (i.e. proxy) information for this specific data source at the same layer. This process continues till the virtual cluster head information has been updated at each cluster head.

Proposed Proxy Based Scalable Architecture

When a source receives a data request (from its cluster head, or its cluster members when itself is a cluster head), it also acquires the closest proxy information. To respond the request, the source sends its data to its closest proxy. The closest proxy then distributes the data to its virtual cluster members, which are the lower layer proxies that want data from the same source. Therefore, each customer will receive the data eventually.

Proposed Proxy Based Scalable Architecture

Proposed Proxy Based Scalable Architecture

HOW IS IT MORE SCALABLE? In the proxy based architecture proposed, a customer node is assigned as a proxy for a source only if it has requested data from the same source. This proxy information could be forwarded to a higher layer cluster head and merged. However, it is always guaranteed that the newly chosen proxy is a customer that requests data from the source. When a proxy receives the data from the source, it forms a multicast tree among its sub-proxies. This means that a proxy only communicates with limited number of sub-proxies and the bandwidth needed is limited. When the network is relatively static, the proxy update is rather occasional and it happens mostly in the lower layers. Therefore, it does not cause scalability problem. Similar to the fusion based clustering architecture, the multicast tree in the proxy based architecture is built hop by hop. Therefore, the processing load at each node is a constant value and there is no scalability issue regarding this. In summary, the proxy based clustering architecture is scalable in terms of different dimensions in support of the traffic information sharing application in a vehicular network.

Simulation results

Simulation results

Simulation results

Simulation results

Conclusion
In this paper we studied a vehicular network architecture for traffic data sharing applications. To make the entire network scalable, the road side units were exploited as peers to forward traffic data among each other. The proxy based architecture that we proposed integrates a clustering based P2P multicast architecture, the fusion of data requests, and a proxy assignment scheme. We provided a rigorous analysis on both the existing clustering architectures and the proposed proxy based architecture. The simulation results verified our analysis and demonstrated that in the proxy based clustering architecture, the data download traffic keeps constant as the network size grows, which further proves the scalability of the proposed network architecture.

THANK YOU.