A prognostic

nostic solution for transport management based on Mobile Ad hoc Network

Noman Islam1, Zubair A. Shaikh2 , Ghulam Ali Mallah3

1,2
National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan
3
Shah Abdul Latif University
1
noman.islam@nu.edu.pk; 2zubair.shaikh@nu.edu.pk ; 3ghulamali@salu.edu.pk
noman.islam@nu.edu.pk

AbstractMobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a type of etc. The proposed system employs a prognostic approach to
network that is formed between mobile hosts without any prior discovery based on the correlation among various services.
planning. This extempore temperament of MANET makes it a Predictions are made about the future services and then these
natural candidate for solving transportation problems. We predictions are attached with the current response, thus
present a prognostic solution for transport m
management based reducing the network overhead and the latency.
on MANET. The prognostic approach utilizes historical data to Rest of the paper discusses the prognostic ITS approach
predictively discover safety and non-safety
safety services in the in detail. In the next section, the
he proposed prognostic ITS is
surroundings. The historical data is analyzed to discover introduced and explained. The implementation of the
relationships among the services and are then used to predic
predict
proposed solution is then reported in the subsequent section.
and discover potential future services. The system has been
implemented in a lab-setting
setting by means of a set of laptops
We also discuss the literature relevant to the proposed work.
(simulating vehicles) establishing an n ad hoc network. The The paper is then concluded in the final section along
a with
latency analysis of the proposed solution is done with the possible extensions of the proposed work.
traditional solutions. The results show improved latency with
II. MATERIALS AND METHOD
the proposed approach.
Figure 1 shows the block diagram of our proposed ITS.
Keywords- ITS, MANET, Service Discovery, Position Based Every node comprises of a number of components for data
Discovery, Correlation representation, discovery and routing operations. The nodes
are connected to each other by means of a connectivity
I. INTRODUCTION medium like Wi-Fi or blue-tooth
tooth to establish a MANET.
Traveling has become an essential component of todays
life. With the rise in population densityy and the increasing
desire for motorization, we are anticipating a huge rise in
number of vehicles on the road. The mounting volume of
traffic surfaces number of hazards i.e. significant number of
accidents, traffic congestion, air pollution and increase
increased fuel
consumption etc. These hazards upshot to loss of lives,
money and precious time. However, the rapid progression in
computational devices and connectivity mediums in past
years have lead to the viability of incorporating information
technology for addressing
dressing the traffic problems. Intelligent
Transportation System (ITS) is the integration of technology
and infrastructure to address traffic issues and engender
several useful applications. These applications include safety
applications like emergency notifications,
ifications, driver assistance,
traffic regulation etc. as well as non safety applications like
m-banking, gaming, m-shopping etc). Among the various
technologies employed for ITS, Mobile Ad hoc Network Figure 1: Block Diagram of proposed ITS
(MANET) is becoming the dominant technology because oof
the flexibility and ease of deployment of such networks. This The individual nodes run a number of sub-components
sub as
paper proposes an ITS based on MANET that attempts to shown further in Figure 2. The user agent provides a well
automate various aspects of a traffic management system. It defined interface through which a user can pose various
provides a real-time time discovery mechanism for the types of queries related to safety
y and non-safety
non applications.
dissemination of traffic information
rmation to adjoining nodes. It The logging component maintains the history of the user
also provides an infrastructure for various safety and non non- requests in the form of a local database. The data
safety traffic applications. The mainstay of the proposed ITS representation component maintains the user interests data
solution rests on locating the desired information available at as well as the meta-data
data essential to maintain the semantics
semanti
some participating node on the network ccalled the service of the data. This includes the information about any services
discovery process. Here, the service is any invoke
invoke-able hard like the hospitals and restaurants nearby, traffic congestion
or software utility like m-banking
banking service and gaming server information etc.
 DiscoveryComponent() {
while(1) {
Message();
Message m = receiveMessage();
if(m.type == SREQ) {
.request)) {
if(data.contains(m.request
related = getRelatedServices (m.request);
send(generateReply
Reply(m) + related);
}else{
disseminateToAheadNodes
ateToAheadNodesOnly(m);
}
}

else if(m.type == SREP) {

Figure 2: Block Diagram illustrating individual node
components
The mining component applies association rules mining
algorithm to estimate correlation among the services that can
be used further to predict future services and piggyback with
the current request during discovery process. The discovery
component inquires on the network abou about the services
relevant to a particular user request. The details of these
components are provided in the following subsub-sections.
A. User Agent
The user agent comprises of an interface through which
user can request for a particular type of service. Figure 3
provides a snapshot of user interface. The interface provides
various operations corresponding to different type of safety
and non-safety
safety services. The user queries are logged in a log
database and then the discovery component is requested to
discover the services corresponding to user requests.
Figure 3: Snapshot of User Agent
B. Logging Component
The logging component maintains a record of the
discovery requests made by user in past. The records are
maintained in the form of service session. This informa
information is
very vital and used for analyzing the trends among the
services. The format of a session record is as follows:
session = <Date and Time> <Service Id> +
where + represents 1 or more occurrences
if(m.destination == System.hostname)
System. {
data.add(m.service);
related = getRelatedServices
getRelatedSer (m);
);
data.add(related);
}else{
send(m);
}
}
}
}
Figure 4: Pseudo code describing working of discovery
component
A session starts with the date and time when it started.
This is followed by a sequence of service ids corresponding
to the services requested by the user.
C. Data Mining Component
The data mining component applies the FP-GrowthFP
association rules mining algorithm to compute frequent item
sets. FP-Growth
Growth algorithm is a tree based algorithm to
efficiently compute the item sets. The frequent item sets
represent
nt the underlying associations/relationships among
the services that are used during the discovery phase.
D. Data Representation Component
The data representation component maintains the actual
data/services and the meta-datadata required for interoperability
among the nodes. The meta-data data information is maintained
in the form of ontology document. An ontology is defined as
the vocabulary of a domain maintained in the form of
classes, attributes, relationships and instances.
E. Discovery Component
Figure 4 describes es the discovery component. The
component listens for incoming message. In case of a SREQ,
it looks locally if it can entertain the request. In this case, a
reply is generated. The reply includes the response of the
requested service as well as the services
service correlated to the
request based on the data mining algorithm results. If the
request cant be entertained, the request is propagated to
ahead nodes i.e. the direction in which the node is travelling.
The request is not sent backward as the area of interest
intere to the
node is the region ahead.
In case of a SREP received by the node, it first sees if it
is the intended destination. In this case, the node adds the
details from the SREP packet locally. This includes the
response of the requested service as well as the relevant
services. If the node is not the intended destination, the node
propagates the reply to ahead nodes.
 Table 1: List of services provided by the ITS accessing a particular service (e.g. weather, traffic status etc.)
Service Id Service Name when data mining has been used in contrast to the
1 Weather conventional broadcasting approach is used without any data
2 Road Condition mining. Figure 5 shows the results obtained under different
3 Accident warning network settings. The average reduction in latency in the first
4 Traffic Status experiment is 3.4 sec while the latency improvement is 0.9
5 Signal Status sec in the second experiment with the increase in the number
6 Bank of services and the number of nodes in the network. From
7 ATM
the graphs, it can be easily concluded that the prognostic
8 Mobile Banking
approach gives rise to lower latency as compared to the
9 Shopping Mall
10 Food Center
traditional counterpart. The performance improvement
11 Hospital observed in these experiments are due to the proactive
12 Petrol Pump fetching of discovery requests in advance based on the
13 Tyre puncture shop predictive analysis of the discovery component.
14 Police Station
15 University V. RELATED WORK
16 College There has been a number of transportation system
17 School proposed in literature. This includes infrastructured as well
18 Bus Stop as infrastructure-less systems. iTrasnsIT [1] is an effort
19 Flyover towards the integration of systems under smart cities. It
20 Auto Workshop provides a data model for context acquisition as well as a
21 CNG Station programming model for building transportation services.
22 Medical Store JETS[2] is exploring how the context-aware mechanisms can
23 City Condition
be incorporated in ITS. FleetNet[3] is a self-organized
III. IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS system based on inter-vehicle communication. Each vehicle
receives the traffic information from neighboring vehicles
The proposed system has been implemented using a set via a broadcast message, analyses the message to generate a
of lap-tops establishing a MANET each of them connected traffic profile which is further disseminated on next
via Wireless LAN in Windows environment. The user agent broadcast. vGrid[4] is based on the establishment of an ad
of the software and the protocol details has been hoc grid with the surrounding vehicles. The vehicles share
implemented in Java. The back end database has been traffic information with each other and perform a range of
implemented in My SQL. 23 services have been selected for safety and non-safety routines like lane merging, ramp
the implementation. Table 1 shows the list of services used metering etc. [5] proposes an approach towards traffic
in the proposed system. routing based on Ad hoc grids. The author suggests the usage
of a distributed shortest path algorithm computed using ad
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS hoc grids to determine the nominal route towards the
To gauge the efficacy of the proposed prognostic destination for a particular vehicle.
approach to discovery, we probed the latency incurred in

a) 25 services, 50 nodes b) 50 services, 50 nodes

Average latency improvement = 3.4 sec Average latency improvement = 0.9 sec

Figure 5: Analysis of latency of the proposed system

As far as the service discovery algorithms are considered
there a number of directory based (JINI[6], DReggie[7], [8]
and Salutation[9]) as well as directory-less
approaches(GSD[10], Microsoft UPnP[11], IBM
DeapSpace[12], Bluetooth Service Discovery protocol[13],
Allia[14] and Konark[15]) cited in literature. In addition, a
number of cross layer approaches have also been proposed
that includes [16] and [17]. To further add to the
performance of discovery process, [18] has proposed the
incorporation of relationship among the services to discover
the services.
VI. CONCLUSION
This paper presents an Intelligent Transportation System
based on MANET. It intelligently computes the safety (as
well as relevant) information needed by a driving node. This
helps in automating different transportation problems. This
also ensures better driving experience and safety of
passengers. There are a number of extension points to our
work. A thorough analysis of the efficacy of the proposed
system is required focusing on other parameters. In addition,
there are a number of problems related to security, data
management and transactions layers of the proposed system
that requires further investigation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This manuscript is an extension of our earlier paper that
has been published in proceedings of conference
International Conference on Computers & Emerging
Technologies (ICCET 2012), that was held on 13-15 April
2012 at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Sindh,
Pakistan. We would also like to acknowledge Higher
Education Commission (HEC), Pakistan for their support in
this research work. In addition, we would like to show
appreciation to Mr. Kelash Kumar, Bilal Saeed, Jai kumar
and Junaid Iqbal from NUCES who worked on the
implementation phase of this project.
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