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A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensor Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 March 2023) | Viewed by 27635

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Prof. Dr. Unai Hernandez

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Faculty of Engineering, University of Deusto, Avenida de las Universidades 24, 48007 Bilbao, Spain
Interests: remote labs; online learning
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Prof. Dr. Joaquim Ferreira

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Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão de Águeda, Instituto de Telecomunicações, Universidade de Aveiro, 3010-193 Aveiro, Portugal
Interests: vehicular communications; dependable systems; real-time communications; cybersecurity; cooperative, connected and automated mobility; embedded systems
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

It is a fact that an increasing number of vehicles on the market have some kind of interface that allows them to connect both to services offered by the manufacturer and services offered by third parties. Thus, we can stream music or videos through the car’s HMI, or obtain real-time information on the status of the route we are following.

In addition, this communication channel can allow us not only to receive information in the vehicle but also to use it as a data generator. Thus, we can consider the vehicle as a mobile sensor within a wireless sensor network (WSN). However, it is a network in which the nodes (the vehicles) can move at high speeds, and where the orography in which they move can make it difficult to transmit information to a server or service deployed in the cloud.

The advantages of using vehicles as sources and transmitters of information can be great, including assisting in traffic management operations, access control in cities, and environmental monitoring, to name but a few examples.

This Special Issue welcomes contributions dealing with all the technological facets of sensor networks for vehicular communications, including architecture, communication technologies, and advanced applications, sensing, and algorithms, but also on deployment issues, such as the development street or road side units to gather information from the vehicles.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

Vehicle-to-sensor and sensor-to-vehicle communication architectures
Cooperative sensing applications in the scope of VANETs
Cooperative vehicle–infrastructure systems and architectures
Vehicular system and communication technologies
Networks optimization and QoS guarantee
Big data applications for sensor networks in the scope of VANETs
Sensor networks to improve autonomous vehicle perception
In-vehicle wireless sensor networks

Dr. Unai Hernandez
Prof. Dr. Joaquim Ferreira
Guest Editors

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Published Papers (9 papers)

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Research

20 pages, 1938 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Double-Layer Blockchain Based Trust Management Model for Secure Internet of Vehicles

by Wenbo Ruan, Jia Liu, Yuanfang Chen, Sardar M. N. Islam and Muhammad Alam

Sensors 2023, 23(10), 4699; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23104699 - 12 May 2023

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1993

Abstract

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) enables vehicles to share data that help vehicles perceive the surrounding environment. However, vehicles can spread false information to other IoV nodes; this incorrect information misleads vehicles and causes confusion in traffic, therefore, a vehicular trust model is needed to check the trustworthiness of the message. To eliminate the spread of false information and detect malicious nodes, we propose a double-layer blockchain trust management (DLBTM) mechanism to objectively and accurately evaluate the trustworthiness of vehicle messages. The double-layer blockchain consists of the vehicle blockchain and the RSU blockchain. We also quantify the evaluation behavior of vehicles to show the trust value of the vehicle’s historical behavior. Our DLBTM uses logistic regression to accurately compute the trust value of vehicles, and then predict the probability of vehicles providing satisfactory service to other nodes in the next stage. The simulation results show that our DLBTM can effectively identify malicious nodes, and over time, the system can recognize at least 90% of malicious nodes. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensor Networks for Vehicular Communications)

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18 pages, 5527 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Resource Management for Collaborative 5G-NR-V2X RSUs to Enhance V2I/N Link Reliability

by SangHoon An and KyungHi Chang

Sensors 2023, 23(8), 3989; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23083989 - 14 Apr 2023

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3097

Abstract

In the development of autonomous driving technology, 5G-NR vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology is a key technology that enhances safety and enables effective management of traffic information. Road-side units (RSUs) in 5G-NR V2X provide nearby vehicles with information and exchange traffic, and safety information with future autonomous vehicles, enhancing traffic safety and efficiency. This paper proposes a communication system for vehicle networks based on a 5G cellular network with RSUs consisting of the base station (BS) and user equipment (UE), and validates the system performance when providing services from different RSUs. The proposed approach maximizes the utilization of the entire network and ensures the reliability of V2I/V2N links between vehicles and each RSU. It also minimizes the shadowing area in the 5G-NR V2X environment, and maximizes the average throughput of vehicles through collaborative access between BS- and UE-type RSUs. The paper applies various resource management techniques, such as dynamic inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC), coordinated scheduling coordinated multi-point (CS-CoMP), cell range extension (CRE), and 3D beamforming, to achieve high reliability requirements. Simulation results demonstrate improved performance in outage probability, reduced shadowing area, and increased reliability through decreased interference and increased average throughput when collaborating with BS- and UE-type RSUs simultaneously. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensor Networks for Vehicular Communications)

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33 pages, 3375 KiB

Open AccessEditor’s ChoiceArticle

A Modular In-Vehicle C-ITS Architecture for Sensor Data Collection, Vehicular Communications and Cloud Connectivity

by David Rocha, Gil Teixeira, Emanuel Vieira, João Almeida and Joaquim Ferreira

Sensors 2023, 23(3), 1724; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23031724 - 3 Feb 2023

Cited by 16 | Viewed by 4385

Abstract

The growth of the automobile industry in recent decades and the overuse of personal vehicles have amplified problems directly related to road safety, such as the increase in traffic congestion and number of accidents, as well as the degradation of the quality of roads. At the same time, and with the contribution of climate change effects, dangerous weather events have become more common on road infrastructure. In this context, Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions emerge to overcome the limitations of human and local sensory systems, through the collection and distribution of relevant data to Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs). In this paper, an intra- and inter-vehicle sensory data collection system is presented, starting with the acquisition of relevant data present on the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus, collected through the vehicle’s On-Board-Diagnostics II (OBD-II) port, as well as on an on-board smartphone device and possibly other additional sensors. Short-range communication technologies, such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Wi-Fi, and ITS-G5, are employed in conjunction with long-range cellular networks for data dissemination and remote cloud monitoring. The results of the experimental tests allow the analysis of the road environment, as well as the notification in near real-time of adverse road conditions to drivers. The developed data collection system reveals itself as a potentially valuable tool for improving road safety and to iterate on the current Road Weather Models (RWMs). Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensor Networks for Vehicular Communications)

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28 pages, 14000 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Contention-Free Cooperative MAC Protocol for Eliminating Heterogenous Collisions in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

by Nyi Nyi Linn, Kai Liu and Qiang Gao

Sensors 2023, 23(2), 1033; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23021033 - 16 Jan 2023

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 2478

Abstract

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), efficient data dissemination to a specified number of vehicles with minimum collisions and limited access delay is critical for accident prevention in road safety. However, packet collisions have a significant impact on access delay, and they may lead to unanticipated link failure when a range of diversified collisions are combined due to complex traffic conditions and rapid changes in network topology. In this paper, we propose a distributed contention-free cooperative medium access control (CFC-MAC) protocol to reduce heterogenous collisions and unintended access delay in stochastic traffic scenarios. Firstly, we develop a cooperative communication system model and cooperative forwarding mechanism to explore the optimum road path between the source and destination by identifying the potential cooperative vehicles. Secondly, we propose a vectorized trajectory estimation mechanism to suppress merging collisions by identifying the relative velocity of vehicles with different speeds in a specific time interval. Based on the case study, typical heterogeneous collisions and aggregated heterogeneous collisions at dissociated positions and associated positions are investigated. In both cases, we propose the corresponding collision-resolving mechanisms by methodically recapturing the colliding time slot or acquiring the available free time slots after identifying the access vehicles and comparing the received signal strengths. Performance analysis for collision probability and access delay is conducted. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed protocol can achieve deterministic access delay and a minimal collision rate, substantially outperforming the existing solutions. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensor Networks for Vehicular Communications)

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19 pages, 895 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Road Traffic Forecast Based on Meteorological Information through Deep Learning Methods

by Fernando José Braz, João Ferreira, Francisco Gonçalves, Kawan Weege, João Almeida, Fabiano Baldo and Pedro Gonçalves

Sensors 2022, 22(12), 4485; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22124485 - 14 Jun 2022

Cited by 15 | Viewed by 3270

Abstract

Forecasting road flow has strong importance for both allowing authorities to guarantee safety conditions and traffic efficiency, as well as for road users to be able to plan their trips according to space and road occupation. In a summer resort, such as beaches near cities, traffic depends directly on weather conditions, variables that should be of great impact on the quality of forecasts. Will the use of a dataset with information on transit flows enhanced with meteorological information allow the construction of a precise traffic flow forecasting model, allowing predictions to be made in advance of the traffic flow in suitable time? The present work evaluates different machine learning methods, namely long short-term memory, autoregressive LSTM, and a convolutional neural network, and data attributes to predict traffic flows based on radar and meteorological sensor information. The models trained to predict the traffic flow have shown that weather conditions were essential for this forecast, and thus, these variables were employed in the evaluated deep-learning models. The results pointed out that it is possible to forecast the traffic flow at a reasonable error level for one-hour periods, and the CNN model presented the lowest prediction error values and consumed the least time to build its predictions. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensor Networks for Vehicular Communications)

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20 pages, 1534 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Secure Pseudonym-Based Conditional Privacy-Preservation Authentication Scheme in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

by Mahmood A. Al-Shareeda, Mohammed Anbar, Selvakumar Manickam and Iznan H. Hasbullah

Sensors 2022, 22(5), 1696; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22051696 - 22 Feb 2022

Cited by 31 | Viewed by 3175

Abstract

Existing identity-based schemes utilized in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) rely on roadside units to offer conditional privacy-preservation authentication and are vulnerable to insider attacks. Achieving rapid message signing and verification for authentication is challenging due to complex operations, such as bilinear pairs. This paper proposes a secure pseudonym-based conditional privacy-persevering authentication scheme for communication security in VANETs. The Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and secure hash cryptographic function were used in the proposed scheme for signing and verifying messages. After a vehicle receives a significant amount of pseudo-IDs and the corresponding signature key from the Trusted Authority (TA), it uses them to sign a message during the broadcasting process. Thus, the proposed scheme requires each vehicle to check all the broadcasting messages received. Besides, in the proposed scheme, the TA can revoke misbehaving vehicles from continuously broadcasting signed messages, thus preventing insider attacks. The security analysis proved that the proposed scheme fulfilled the security requirements, including identity privacy-preservation, message integrity and authenticity, unlinkability, and traceability. The proposed scheme also withstood common security attacks such as man-in-the-middle, impersonation, modification, and replay attacks. Besides, our scheme was resistant against an adaptive chosen-message attack under the random oracle model. Furthermore, our scheme did not employ bilinear pairing operations; therefore, the performance analysis and comparison showed a lower resulting overhead than other identity-based schemes. The computation costs of the message signing, individual signature authentication, and batch signature authentication were reduced by 49%, 33.3%, and 90.2%, respectively. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensor Networks for Vehicular Communications)

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18 pages, 1189 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Latency Reduction in Vehicular Sensing Applications by Dynamic 5G User Plane Function Allocation with Session Continuity

by Pablo Fondo-Ferreiro, David Candal-Ventureira, Francisco Javier González-Castaño and Felipe Gil-Castiñeira

Sensors 2021, 21(22), 7744; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21227744 - 21 Nov 2021

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2573

Abstract

Vehicle automation is driving the integration of advanced sensors and new applications that demand high-quality information, such as collaborative sensing for enhanced situational awareness. In this work, we considered a vehicular sensing scenario supported by 5G communications, in which vehicle sensor data need to be sent to edge computing resources with stringent latency constraints. To ensure low latency with the resources available, we propose an optimization framework that deploys User Plane Functions (UPFs) dynamically at the edge to minimize the number of network hops between the vehicles and them. The proposed framework relies on a practical Software-Defined-Networking (SDN)-based mechanism that allows seamless re-assignment of vehicles to UPFs while maintaining session and service continuity. We propose and evaluate different UPF allocation algorithms that reduce communications latency compared to static, random, and centralized deployment baselines. Our results demonstrated that the dynamic allocation of UPFs can support latency-critical applications that would be unfeasible otherwise. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensor Networks for Vehicular Communications)

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15 pages, 1476 KiB

Open AccessArticle

vTrust: An IoT-Enabled Trust-Based Secure Wireless Energy Sharing Mechanism for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

by Kamran Ahmad Awan, Ikram Ud Din, Ahmad Almogren, Byung-Seo Kim and Ayman Altameem

Sensors 2021, 21(21), 7363; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21217363 - 5 Nov 2021

Cited by 10 | Viewed by 2295

Abstract

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is a modern concept that enables network nodes to communicate and disseminate information. VANET is a heterogeneous network, due to which the VANET environment exposes to have various security and privacy challenges. In the future, the automobile industry will progress towards assembling electric vehicles containing energy storage batteries employing these resources to travel as an alternative to gasoline/petroleum. These vehicles may have the capability to share their energy resources upon the request of vehicles having limited energy resources. In this article, we have proposed a trust management-based secure energy sharing mechanism, named vTrust, which computes the trust degree of nodes to authenticate nodes. The proposed mechanism is a multi-leveled centralized approach utilizing both the infrastructure and vehicles to sustain a secure environment. The proposed vTrust can aggregate and propagate the degree of trust to enhance scalability. The node that requests to obtain the energy resources may have to maintain a specified level of trust threshold for earning resources. We have also evaluated the performance of the proposed mechanism against several existing approaches and determine that the proposed mechanism can efficiently manage a secure environment during resource sharing by maintaining average malicious nodes detection of 91.3% and average successful energy sharing rate of 89.5%, which is significantly higher in comparison to the existing approaches. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensor Networks for Vehicular Communications)

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22 pages, 3823 KiB

Open AccessArticle

An Enhancement for IEEE 802.11p to Provision Quality of Service with Context Aware Channel Access for the Forward Collision Avoidance Application in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network

by Tripti C and Jibukumar M G

Sensors 2021, 21(20), 6937; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21206937 - 19 Oct 2021

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2359

Abstract

Key application of an intelligent transportation system is traffic safety, and it provides driver assistance. Safety messages are of two types, beacon messages and event messages. The nodes broadcast these messages in the vehicular networks. The system must rely on a robust medium access control (MAC) protocol to support delivery of safety messages. The standard medium access scheme that is used in vehicular networks to provide service differentiation to support various applications is IEEE 802.11p. The emergency event messages should reach the drivers immediately to take necessary steps to avoid casualties on the road. In IEEE 802.11p, both of these messages are considered with the same priority so that no separate differentiation is created. The proposed work focuses on improving the quality of service for forward collision warning applications in intelligent transportation systems. The scheme proposes a priority-based cooperative MAC (PCMAC) for channel access that works on the context of information. Simulation and analytical results validate improved performance of PCMAC in terms of packet delivery ratio, throughput, and average packet delivery delay, as compared with other eminent MAC protocols. The simulation results show that it has a 9% higher improvement in throughput than IEEE 802.11p and has better performance in the increasing number of emergency messages. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensor Networks for Vehicular Communications)

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