iMOB: An Intelligent Urban Mobility Management System Based on Vehicular Social Networks

The vehicular social networks (VSNs) paradigm is a special class of vehicular networks (VANETs), where features and social aspects are taken into account. Starting from this concept, two different approaches can be applied in VSNs, which are the social network analysis (SNA) measures and the social networking concepts (SNC). In the past few years, several systems have been proposed to deal with traffic congestion problems. They rely on integrating computational technologies such as VANETs, central server, and roadside units. A number of systems employ a hybrid approach, this means that they still need an infrastructure support (central server or roadside unit) to achieve the goals of the system. In order to surpass that, this work deals with the question of how to manage the urban mobility, when an en-route event is detected, in an infrastructure-less environment and scalable fashion. To achieve that, the main goal is to apply VSNs to investigate how SNA measures and SNC can help in the urban mobility management in a distributed fashion. To this end, it was proposed the iMOB system, which is an intelligent urban mobility management system. The system consists of the 3-tier: the environment sensing (bottom tier), the vehicle ranking mechanism (middle tier), and the altruistic rerouting decision (upper tier). The SNA egocentric betweenness measure is applied in the middle tier and SNCs such as social interactions and virtual community were utilized in the upper tier. iMOB was evaluated in simulation-based experiments being able to outperform all its competitors in all assessed metrics. The results obtained lead us to conclude that the application of concepts and analysis of social network, in a vehicular environment, have great potential to improve the reliability and efficiency of urban mobility management systems in a practical and cost-effective way.