Resource Provisioning and Dynamic Resource Management in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Traffic congestion has adverse consequences on the safety, economy and environment. The loss of productivity due to delays stemming from traffic jams, and increased fuel consumption leads to adverse economic consequences. For example, traffic congestion alone costs the USA 2.8 billion gallons of wasted fuel and a productivity loss of 4.2 billion hours per year [1]. Different studies [2], [3] have also shown an increase in greenhouse emissions due to vehicle idling during traffic jams. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) [4] are envisioned to address the numerous challenges faced by the transportation sector. A variety of applications will be supported by ITS including safety critical applications, such as Preventing Red Light Running and Safe Lane Changing; applications for improving driving experience, such as Dynamic Traffic Rerouting and Vehicle Health Monitoring, and applications for law enforcement and disaster management, such as Tracking Stolen Vehicles and Orderly Evacuation. Supporting the range of applications in ITS requires autonomous coordination among vehicles, sensing of trafficrelated events, and dissemination of real-time alerts reliably to drivers. Supporting these capabilities is a hard problem; it requires a thorough understanding of the complexities of the ITS physics. The dominant physical artifacts of ITS are the wireless medium, mobility of vehicles, and sensing by vehicles and road-side units (RSUs). An ITS comprises at least three types of communication networks: (1) a wireless network formed among the vehicles for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, (2) a wireless network that involves the vehicles communicating with the road-side infrastructure (V2I), and (3) a predominantly wireline network that connects the multiple infrastructure elements. Additional networks, such as the cellular network and public Wi-Fi, can also be leveraged. Real-timeliness and reliability of information dissemination via V2V and V2I communication is hard due to