Adaptive scheduling for real-time and temporal information services in vehicular networks

Vehicular networks represent a research area of significant importance in improving the safety, efficiency and sustainability of transportation systems. One of the key research problems in vehicular networks is real-time data dissemination, which is crucial to the satisfactory performance of many emergent applications providing real-time information services in vehicular networks. Specifically, the two issues need to be addressed in this problem are maintenance of temporal data freshness and timely dissemination of data. Most existing works only considered periodical data update via backbone wired networks in maintaining temporal data freshness. However, many applications rely on passing vehicles to upload their collected information via wireless network, which imposes new challenges as the uplink data update will have to compete with the downlink data dissemination for the limited wireless bandwidth. With such observations, we propose a temporal information service system, in which vehicles are able to collect up-to-date temporal information and upload them to the roadside units (RSU) along their trajectories. Meanwhile, RSU can disseminate its available data items to vehicles based on their specific requests. Particularly, in this paper, we first quantitatively analyze the freshness of temporal data and propose a mathematical model to evaluate the usefulness of the temporal data. Next, we give the formulation of the proposed real-time and temporal information service (RTIS) problem, and prove the NP-hardness of this problem by constructing a polynomial-time reduction from 0-1 knapsack problem. Subsequently, we establish a probabilistic model to theoretically analyze the tradeoff between timely temporal data update and requested data dissemination sharing a common communication resource, which provides a deeper insight of the proposed RTIS. Further, a heuristic algorithm, namely adaptive update request scheduling (AURS), is designed to enhance the efficacy of RTIS by synthesizing the broadcast effect, the real-time service requirement and the service quality in making scheduling decisions. The computational complexity and scalability analysis of AURS is also discussed. Last but not least, a simulation model is implemented and a comprehensive performance evaluation has been carried out to demonstrate the superiority of ARUS against several state-of-the-art approaches in a variety of application scenarios.