Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The convergence of vehicle and sensor networks offers viable means for data dissemination to distributed services such as traffic monitoring, safety warnings, infotainment, and proactive surveillance of roads and streets. However, data dissemination in vehicular sensor networks (VSNs) is a challenging task due to high mobility of vehicles; frequent network topology changes; high volume of data; and different data dissemination and application requirements. For instance, most safety warning applications will require fast and reliable data delivery to nearby vehicles, which can be achieved by local broadcasts. A monitoring service may require continuous data delivery to a region or command centre, in which the use of broadcasts would not be feasible or efficient. Thus, another challenge lies in adapting on-the-fly to the best data dissemination approach depending on the different vehicle or user's interests. Existing solutions address some of these issues individually and do not adapt to different services or user requirements. The heterogeneity of services, users and data requirements seems to be an opportunity to apply social network-based decision making when selecting forwarding vehicles. It might be possible to map mobility patterns as close as possible to real traffic behavior by exploiting social ties among drivers. Such mapping would be extremely useful in data forwarding decisions. Therefore, this research program will investigate these issues under a unified framework and then develop novel hybrid adaptive techniques that take advantage of the strengths and deal with the weaknesses of existing data dissemination strategies. This program will focus in devising social network-based schemes that exploit ""interactions"" among vehicles (i.e., common visited places, encounters, mobility patterns) as well as drivers' social ties to improve data dissemination in VSNs. It is expected that the proposed program will not only foster advances in VSNs and intelligent transportation systems (ITS), but also prepare students in this demanding research field and place them in a more competitive position in the academia and industry.