Eun-Kyu Lee

Vehicular cloud networking: architecture and design principles

Over the past several decades, VANET has been a core networking technology to provide safety and comfort to drivers in vehicular environments. Emerging applications and services, however, require major changes to its underlying computing and networking models, which demand new network planning for VANET. This article especially examines how VANET evolves with two emerging paradigms: vehicular cloud computing and information-centric networking. VCC brings the mobile cloud model to vehicular networks and thus changes the way of network service provisioning, whereas ICN changes the notion of data routing and dissemination. We envision a new vehicular networking system, vehicular cloud networking, on top of them. This article scrutinizes its architecture and operations, and discusses its design principles.

Internet of Vehicles: From intelligent grid to autonomous cars and vehicular fogs

Recent advances in communications, controls, and embedded systems have changed the perception of a car. A vehicle has been the extension of the man’s ambulatory system, docile to the driver’s commands. It is now a formidable sensor platform, absorbing information from the environment (and from other cars) and feeding it to drivers and infrastructure to assist in safe navigation, pollution control, and traffic management. The next step in this evolution is just around the corner: the Internet of Autonomous Vehicles. Pioneered by the Google car, the Internet of Vehicles will be a distributed transport fabric capable of making its own decisions about driving customers to their destinations. Like other important instantiations of the Internet of Things (e.g. the smart building), the Internet of Vehicles will have communications, storage, intelligence, and learning capabilities to anticipate the customers’ intentions. The concept that will help transition to the Internet of Vehicles is the vehicular fog, the equivalent of instantaneous Internet cloud for vehicles, providing all the services required by the autonomous vehicles. In this article, we discuss the evolution from intelligent vehicle grid to autonomous, Internet-connected vehicles, and vehicular fog.

Installation and evaluation of RFID readers on moving vehicles

Due to recent technology advancements, RFID readers have been proposed for several vehicular applications ranging from safe navigation to intelligent transport. However, one obstacle to deployment is the unpredictable read performance. An RFID reader occasionally fails to read an RFID tag even in static circumstances, mostly due to collisions. In a mobile vehicular environment, latency becomes the key performance factor because of the high speed of vehicles. This is particularly true when the RFID reader is on the moving vehicle. In this paper, we investigate RFID read latency and thus effectiveness of on-vehicles reader installations for a wide range of speeds. First, we experimentally study the impact of reader and tag relative positions on read errors and read rates. Then we conduct road experiments at varying speeds. The results reveal the critical factors that influence on-vehicle RFID read performance, and give us guidance to identify and pursue directions for improvement.

RFID assisted vehicle positioning in VANETs

With technological advancement, recent VANET applications such as safe driving and emergency rescue often demand high position accuracy. Unfortunately, however, conventional localization systems, e.g., GPS, hardly meet new accuracy requirements. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes an RFID-assisted localization system. The proposed system employs the DGPS concept to improve GPS accuracy. A vehicle obtains two different position data: GPS coordinate from its own GPS receiver and accurate physical position via RFID communication. Then, it computes GPS error and shares it with neighbors to help them correct inaccurate GPS coordinates. To evaluate the proposed system, we conduct extensive experiments both on a simulator and on a real world test-bed. The simulation shows that, with the RFID-assisted localization system, vehicles can acquire accurate position both on a freeway and in an urban area. The results from the test-bed experiments demonstrate that the proposed system is feasible in the real VANET environment.

Randomized channel hopping scheme for anti-jamming communication

Jamming attacks have been recently studied as wireless security threats disrupting reliable RF communication in a wireless network. By emitting noise-like signals arbitrarily on the shared wireless medium, a jammer can easily disturb the network. Countermeasures such as Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum enable nodes to avoid the jamming attacks by hopping over multiple channels. However, these solutions require pre-key establishment before data transmission, which in turns introduces several constraints. In order to solve the problem, this paper proposes a novel Quorum Rendezvous Channel Hopping (QRCH) scheme1. Nodes are able to hop over random channels independently, bypassing the need for pre-key establishment. Furthermore, by using a quorum system, nodes are guaranteed to meet within a bounded time to exchange pending messages. The scheme also enables nodes to transmit packets to multiple receivers simultaneously. We validate the proposed scheme via extensive simulations and present its robustness and efficiency.

Frequency quorum rendezvous for fast and resilient key establishment under jamming attack

This paper proposes a novel Frequency Quorum Rendezvous (FQR) scheme for fast and resilient pre-key establishment in anti-jamming spread spectrum techniques. While nodes hop over own frequencies during the key establishment phase, using a quorum system improves their rendezvous probability and reduces time latency.

Evaluating microgrid management and control with an implementable energy management system

A microgrid can be characterized by its integration of distributed energy resources and controllable loads. Such integration brings unique challenges to the microgrid management and control which can be significantly different from conventional power systems. Therefore, a conventional energy management system (EMS) needs to be re-designed with consideration of the unique characteristics of microgrids. To this end, we propose a microgrid EMS named a microgrid platform (MP). We take into account all the functional requirements of a microgrid EMS (i.e., forecast, optimization, data analysis, and human-machine interface) and address the engineering challenges (i.e., flexibility, extensibility, and interoperability) in the design and development of the MP. Moreover, we deploy the prototype system and conduct experiments to evaluate the microgrid management and control in real-world settings at the UCLA Smart Grid Energy Research Center. Our experimental results demonstrate that the MP is able to manage various devices in the testbed, interact with the external systems, and perform optimal energy scheduling and demand response.

Integration of IEC 61850 into a Distributed Energy Resources system in a smart green building

A Distributed Energy Resources (DER) system, composed of distributed generation and storage units, has been proposed as a promising enhancement to the traditional power grids. One key challenge to implement a DER system, however, places on standardizing the communication network for seamless information exchange. As one approach, this paper focuses on integrating IEC 61850, which is an international unified standard for standardizing the communication network within a substation, into a DER system, using the UCLA SMERC building as test bed. To this end, we discuss a mathematical model of PV generation, present a representative demand profile, and develop a battery charging/discharging control algorithm. Moreover, we demonstrate a procedure to integrate IEC 61850 into the DER system step by step, with configuring the communication network and defining the data structure for the information exchange.

A smart web platform for telematics services toward ubiquitous environments

Abstract : Abstract This paper takes care of an evolution of web architecture for Telematics services on ubiquitous environments. Telematics has become one of upcoming convergence fields where many kinds of services are now be operated or planned to be launched. However, most of Telematics services are currently operated in a closed architecture: they require hardware and software configurations exclusively. In order to achieve ubiquitous capabilities in Telematics model, this paper proposes a web service platform for Telematics based on web service architecture. With the proposed Telematics service broker, service providers can register their services, and service consumers can find what services are available and how to use them. Adopting open architecture, the platform will contribute to efficient provision of Telematics services in upcoming ubiquitous environments.

A translator between integrated service/RSVP and differentiated service for end-to-end QoS

This paper proposes a translator which maps QoS parameters between Intserv/RSVP and DiffServ such that it guarantees end-to-end QoS. This translator is placed at the interface between those two networks. For traffic from Intserv/RSVP network to DiffServ network, the translator checks whether resources are reserved for the traffic. If reserved, the translator marks with an appropriate DiffServ Code Point (DSCP) value the IP header of each transmitted packet. In the reverse direction, however, the translator does nothing because the change of the DSCP value does not affect the traffic handling mechanism in Intserv/RSVP network. Based on these principles, a prototype of the translator was implemented and run on a network consisting of Intserv/RSVP and DiffServ networks. Experimental results show that the proposed translator provides end-to-end QoS with good scalability and significantly improves network performance with respect to throughput and packet loss.