Figure 1: Image upload with Roid R-CDN.
car may be enough.
Our approach is called Roid: An R-CDN based
selective vehicular data dissemination architecture.
We assume that cars continuously upload the meta-
data of pictures, including time and location to the
control server. The server assigns priorities and sends
requests to vehicles. These upload requested the pic-
tures based on priorities. The main goal of this paper
is to quantify and detail the benefits of our approach
in realistic simulations.
The second mechanism which we employ is of-
floading cellular network traffic to WiFi networks
along the roadside. The reason behind this is that
WiFi technology is typically cheaper than cellular
technology (Fogg, 2018). This means that, depend-
ing on the priority, data is sent on cellular networks
only if no WiFi network was found for a specific time
period, e.g. 30 seconds.
As illustrated in Figure 1, the Roid architecture
employs a Control Server (CS) between vehicles and
the cloud storage and processing platform. The pur-
pose of the CS is to orchestrate the vehicles based on
the demand of images in the cloud. The figure shows
a simple case where an image of a vehicle 2 does not
need to be uploaded as a similar one from vehicle 1
already exists.
A key assumption of the Roid architecture is that
the CS is aware of a complete road network that it
overlooks. The participating cars in this road network
are connected to it and continuously transmit meta-
data like location of pictures taken. The road network
is divided into road segments (typically 30-100m in
length).
The CS server aims to have an up to date picture of
every road segment. Thus, the CS server keeps track
of the latest uploaded image for each segment and
identifies needed images. Clearly, for each segment,
a new image is needed every few minutes. Secondly,
the CS assigns priorities to each segment, which is
done stochastically based on normal distribution. On
the vehicle side, the images are locally stored in five
queues, based on five demand classes of the images.
Roid also aims to offload a significant amount of
upload traffic to WiFi. Each road segment is associ-
ated to one of these five road segment demand classes.
Then, the CS assigns images from this segment the
corresponding demand class. For each class, the ve-
hicles have different policies regarding WiFi uploads.
Road segments belonging to the maximum class re-
quire no waiting for WiFi, while the others will have a
WiFi waiting time before cellular upload is attempted.
3 IMPLEMENTATION AND
EVALUATION
For the evaluation, we decided to use the Simulation
of Urban Mobility (SUMO) traffic simulation suite
(Lopez et al., 2018). Our Roid implementation is built
on top of SUMO simulator.
The activity diagram presented in Figure 2, de-
scribes the flow of activities in the Roid simulation.
We will go over these step by step below.
1. Start Simulation. The simulation is initialized
in the Roid module by TraCI, an API to interface
ongoing, running simulations. The simulation is
initialized with a number of parameters.
2. 1 Unit Step Into Simulation. The simulation
proceeds in cycles of one time unit.
3. Subscribe to Values of New Vehicles in Simu-
lation. In TracCI, it is possible to subscribe to
the properties of vehicles running in a simulation.
This approach is faster than getting a list of all the
vehicles in each time step of the simulation.
4. Loop Over the Simulated Vehicles. The ap-
proach we follow in this implementation is to loop
over all the spawned vehicles in each time step
and then perform specific Roid operations on each
vehicle, including their communication with the
Control Server. In the following steps, we will be
performing operations on a single vehicle loop of
vehicles as depicted by the dotted box in Figure 2.
5. Vehicle Takes Image. In each time step, we sim-
ulate vehicles taking an image of the road.
6. Vehicle Saves Image Locally. Every image is
first stored in the local vehicle storage before it
is uploaded to the cloud.
7. Vehicle Sends Image Metadata to Control
Server over Control Connection. The image ID,
time and road segment ID are transferred to the
server over the control connection.
8. Server Saves the Image Metadata in a Data
Structure. The server keeps track of the image
metadata received by saving it in a dictionary.
9. Image Required. If additional (not yet requested)
images are required for some road segments, we
proceed with the next step.
10. Server Instructs Vehicle to Send Images. If the
Roid Control Server determined that a particular
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