CSR: III: Small: Collaborative Research: A Hybrid Vehicle-Cloud Solution for Robust, Cost-Efficient Road Monitoring

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY

Investigators

Abstract

Many of today's vehicles are equipped with GPS, networking capabilities, computational resources, and a variety of environment and vehicle performance sensors. The combination of these technologies and the growing presence of such vehicles offer a powerful platform for large-scale road sensing applications to assist drivers in route planning and safe driving. As the number of participating vehicle grows, the sheer amount of data and the cost of its transmission in cellular networks make current, centralized solutions unsustainable. This project proposes an integrated approach to overcoming algorithmic and systems barriers to the cost and scalability challenges of collaborative road sensing. The project conducts four main research tasks: (1) obtain correlated measurements of vehicle sensor readings and network connectivity, (2) reduce the cost of vehicle-to-cloud (V2C) communication through vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) message delegation, (3) develop new communication-efficient algorithmic approaches for collaborative road sensing, (4) evaluate the communication and algorithmic solutions in an emulation framework that pulls together vehicle sensor data, measurements of cellular and V2V connectivity, and traffic flow data from a I-90/94 corridor information system. Results of this project will include reliable connected vehicle communication architecture for both urban and rural settings and theoretically sound decentralized algorithms for sensing and estimation that will be of interest to the broader distributed computing systems community. The communication architecture and sensing algorithms will serve as a prototype for large-scale collaborative, real-time road sensing. The widespread adoption of such an approach will provide drivers with better awareness of hazardous driving conditions, supporting safer and more efficient transportation. Techniques and systems developed in this project will also have applications in settings that require analysis of vast amount of sensed data that is distributed over a large number of devices or systems, for example, in collaborative airspace monitoring in airplanes and environment monitoring in the Internet of Things.