Abstract — The only way to keep up with the ever-increasing number of cars on roads is through constant change and improvement in the transportation infrastructure. Construction of new roads is constrained by space and financial resources. Therefore, there is a need to devise ways to make optimal use of the existing infrastructure. In this position paper, we describe a lane reservation system for highways. The idea is to allow drivers to reserve a slot on a high-priority lane by paying a premium price. The high-priority lane would provide congestion free travel between any two points on the highway. We describe the design of our system, the challenges that need to be solved and the evaluation methodology we are planning to adopt. I.

Abstract — We propose to secure location aware services over vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) with our geographical secure path routing protocol (GSPR). GSPR is an infrastructure free geographic routing protocol, which is resilient to disruptions caused by malicious or faulty nodes. Geographic locations of anonymous nodes are authenticated in order to provide location authentication and location privacy simultaneously. Our protocol also authenticates the routing paths taken by individual messages. This paper presents the design of the GSPR secure geographic routing protocol. The overhead of location authentication is investigated under various scenarios through network simulation. Results show that although the presence of malicious nodes increases the routing path length, a data delivery rate of larger than 80 % is sustained even if 40 % of the nodes are malicious. I.

In this paper, we present TrafficModeler, an opensource, graphical tool for the rapid high-level modeling and generation of vehicular traffic. TrafficModeler supports a variety of traffic definition models representing a wide range of traffic patterns. A set of traffic generation algorithms are implemented to convert high-level models to output compatible with SUMO, a popular open-source microscopic traffic simulator. TrafficModeler drastically reduces the time and effort required to generate traffic for SUMO. Furthermore, it can be easily extended to support other traffic simulators and to incorporate new types of traffic. 1.

Abstract—Vehicular ad hoc networks have emerged recently as a platform to support intelligent inter-vehicle communication and improve traffic safety and performance. The road-constrained and high mobility of the vehicles, their unbounded power source, and the emergence of roadside wireless infrastructures make VANETs a challenging research topic. A key to the development of protocols for intervehicle communication and services lies in the knowledge of the topological characteristics of the VANET communication graph. This article provides answers to the general question: how does a VANET communication graph look like over time and space? This study is the first one that examines a very large-scale VANET graph and conducts a thorough investigation of its topological characteristics using several metrics, not examined in previous studies. Our work characterizes a VANET graph at the connectivity (link) level, quantifies the notion of “qualitative ” nodes as required by routing and dissemination protocols, and examines the existence and evolution of communities (dense clusters of vehicles) in the VANET. Several latent facts about the VANET graph are revealed and incentives for their exploitation in protocol design are examined. I.

Abstract—Highways are an essential component of our society because they are critical to quality of life and to local and national economies. Under good conditions, highways provide a safe and efficient route for people and goods to reach their destinations. However, as a direct consequence of their use, traffic congestion is ever-increasing, undermining the ability of highways to adequately provide an acceptable quality of service. It has become imperative for highway traffic to provide the same time guarantee quality as other transportation methods such as air and rail travel, while maintaining the convenience of flexible scheduling and destination for the individual traveler. In this position paper, we propose Active Highways, a fundamental departure from today's highway traffic management approaches that shifts the highway paradigm from a transportation infrastructure that monitors and controls traffic at the aggregate level, to a computer-based service that operates at the level of individual vehicles. In this sense, highways will become active managers of their own traffic similar to air traffic control. In our vision, future highways and future vehicles will communicate with one another, making the highway system aware of the drivers ’ travel plans and allowing it to cooperate with and actively instruct the driver on achieving them. In particular, Active Highways will allow drivers to reserve slots in special high-priority intelligent lanes. This fine-grained traffic management model will guarantee travel time bounds, handle exceptions and enforce global community and environmental policies using real-time information from vehicle- and infrastructure-based sensors. I.

This thesis would not have been possible without the support of a number of people. First of all, my thanks go to my adviser, Professor Stergios Roumeliotis, for his constant encouragement and guidance, for the long hours of passing along his knowledge and experience, for pushing me beyond my own limitations, and for his seemingly endless supply of interesting research problems. I am also thankful for the time and invaluable advice from