Road surface condition and deterioration are crucial factors to monitor as it affects the safety and comfort of travellers. Currently, road surface inspection is conducted mostly with manual methods that require expensive machinery. Many municipalities lack the resources to conduct such inspections thoroughly and frequently. Collection and maintenance of updated data of road surface damage and conditions is crucial in making decisions regarding road maintenance. This paper leverages machine learning to create a cloud-based application that can detect different road conditions and damages. We describe the functional and non-functional requirements and discuss the detailed design of the software system developed and method of implementation for each component of the system. The paper also covers the integration and unit tests designed to test each component of the system and provides the results of these tests. The literature also provides the results for the acceptance tests and validates if the product developed meets the defined business requirements. Lastly, The paper discusses ethical and safety considerations.

Most grid applications require the processing of large amounts of data stored at different locations across the network which makes optical grid infrastructures optimal for such applications. The increase in intensity of data- and communications of these applications calls for new mechanisms and theories on how to optimally allocate optical grid resources. Typical Divisible Load Theory (DLT) makes optimal allocation of computational resources. In this paper, we introduce Network Aware Divisible Load Algorithm (NADLA) that extends DLT to optimally allocate both the computational and networking resources of an optical grid. We assume a data- and communications-intensive application where data is stored at different sites across the optical grid and can be divided into independent subsets to be processed in parallel at different sites. The algorithm defines an optimal data transfer schedule that defines when to transfer what data subsets to which sites across the optical grid in order to minimize the overall application completion time. It consists of two phases. In the first phase, NADLA provide load distribution that minimizes application completion time taking into account network connectivity and computational and networking resources availability. Site connectivity is estimated by considering the bandwidth and the expected free time of all the links connecting this site to other sites. In the second phase, a simple greedy algorithm is used to allocate computational and networking resources. Extensive Simulations are conducted to examine the performance of the proposed algorithm for different application types and sizes, and different optical grid topologies. Simulation results show the advantages of the proposed algorithm over the traditional DLT approach for the category of applications considered.

With e-science applications becoming more and more data-intensive, data is generally generated and stored at different locations and can be divided into independent subsets to be analyzed distributed at many compute locations across an optical grid. It is required to achieve an optimal utilization of optical grid resources. This is generally achieved by minimizing application completion time, which is calculated as the sum of times spent for data transmission and analysis. We propose a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based approach that co-schedules computing and networking resources to achieve this objective. The proposed approach defines a schedule of when to transfer what data subsets to which sites at what times in order to minimize data processing time as well as defining the routes to be used for transferring data subsets to minimize data transfer times. Simulation results show the advantages of the proposed approach in both minimizing the maximum application completion time and reducing the overall genetic algorithm execution time.

ITS solutions require distributing content to vehicles traveling on streets and highways. This is becoming a more natural evolution in response to the pervasiveness of wireless devices in vehicles and urban areas. We propose a hierarchical architecture for ITS content delivery. The architecture utilizes the concepts and mechanisms of service-orientation to address the stringent requirements of vehicular requirements. The architecture also efficiently organizes services based on their location relevancy. We define algorithms and message structure used within the architecture to manage content services and efficiently delivery them to vehicles. Those algorithms include content service addition, updating, deletion, discovery, consumption and maintenance across different infrastructure nodes. We evaluate the benefits of the proposed scheme using OMNET++ simulator. Our results show that the architecture efficiently delivers content to vehicle traveling at moderate speeds as well as separated by average separation distances. Outside of these ranges, and due to extensive workloads of service delivery requests or requests to maintain delivery session, the communications overhead of the architecture increases decreasing its efficiency.

Providing network QoS involves, among other things, ensuring network survivability in spite of network faults. Fault recovery mechanisms should reduce recovery time, especially for real-time and mission-critical applications while guaranteeing QoS requirements, in terms of bandwidth and delay constraints and maximizing network resources utilization. In this paper, we propose a scalable recovery mechanism based on hierarchical networks. The proposed mechanism is based on inter-domain segmental restoration and is performed by a recovery module (RM) introduced for each domain of the hierarchy. The RM cooperates with path computation element (PCE) to perform recovery while maintaining QoS. Segmental restoration ensures faster recovery time by trying to recover failed paths as close as possible to where the fault occurred. The recovery mechanism aggregates fault notification messages to reduce the size of the signaling storm. In addition, the recovery mechanism ranks failed paths to reduce recovery time for high-priority traffic. We present simulation results conducted for different network sizes and hierarchy structures. Two metrics were considered: recovery time and signaling storm size. A significant decrease in the recovery time with increasing number of hierarchical levels for the same network size is observed. The larger the number of hierarchy levels, the smaller the number of network nodes in each domain and, generally, the faster the routing computations and routing tables search times. In addition, the recovery mechanism results in reducing recovery time for high priority traffic by nearly 90% over that of lower priority traffic. However, increasing the number of hierarchical levels results in a linear increase in signaling storm size.

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) is poised to be a cost-effective platform for many municipal applications in public safety, business and entertainment. In this paper we present WMN-based platform for content delivery within Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications. An example ITS application would be to deliver content used for vehicle route guidance in emergency evacuation situations. The characteristics of ITS applications of higher vehicle speeds and of the limited coverage of WMN (wi-fi) mesh router causes more frequent handoffs which complicates content delivery over wireless mesh networks. Frequent handoffs mandate smaller handoff delay. Using standard IEEE handoffs may cause unacceptable interruption in content delivery. We propose a service-oriented mobility management protocol (SMMP) for ITS content delivery. Within the protocol, content is considered as services described by XML metadata files. The protocol takes advantage of a hierarchical organization of WMN routers to reduce the handoff delay. The quasi-stationary nature of WMN mesh routers enables the detection of the sequence of routers that a vehicle will be in connection with. SMMP provides to the traveling vehicles cached MAC addresses of WMN mesh routers to communicate with. We evaluate the benefits of the proposed protocol and compared it to the traditional solutions using OMNET++ simulator. Our results show that using SMMP reduces handoff latencies and improves the overall network throughput at lower and higher vehicle speeds.

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) are poised to be a cost-effective platform for many municipal applications in public safety, business and entertainment. In this paper we study WMN-based content delivery within Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications. An example ITS application would be to deliver content used for vehicle route guidance in emergency evacuation situations. We study and present three different vehicular mobility management schemes and compare these to the standard IEEE 802.11 mobility management scheme. We evaluate the benefits of the proposed scheme using OMNET++ simulator. Our results show that using the proposed schemes reduces handoff latencies and improves the overall network throughput at lower and higher vehicle speeds. In addition, the proposed schemes result in even distribution of the load of delivering ITS content to vehicles.

Although efficient and safe transportation of people and goods is paramount transportation problems continue to soar. Traffic congestions are of the most visible of transportation problems in large urban areas. Intelligent transportation systems (ITS), exploits and extends information and communication technologies to reverse the deterioration in transportation systems performance. ITS depends, essentially, on gathering and processing real-time traffic information. In this paper, we describe a prototypical proof-of-concept implementation and test-bed of a new Bluetooth and wireless mesh networks platform for traffic network monitoring. The platform uses traveling cars as data collecting sensors or probes and uses wireless municipal mesh networks to transport sensed data. Our platform assumes that cars or drivers' mobile devices are equipped with the widely-adopted low-cost Bluetooth wireless technology. Our platform is able to track cars traveling at speeds up to 70 km/hour. We track cars as they travel and turn on the city roads. In addition, we are able to approximate car speed using two different methods. Our preliminary results indicated an accuracy of ap10-15%. We plan to incorporate more advanced algorithms for calculating accurate speeds in the future.

The wireless grid paradigm has been proposed recently to support seamless collaborations among devices. Realizing the promise of the wireless grid involves providing a set of middleware services that would allow devices to autonomously share their resources. However, existing wireless grid middleware provide only rudimentary support in this regard. This paper describes our initial experiences in realizing autonomic resource management capabilities for wireless grids. Specifically, we present protocols that support self-configuration mechanisms such as resource discovery and brokering. The proposed protocols leverage similar techniques in the wired grid domain while adding new functionality to handle the dynamic nature of wireless grids. We demonstrate the protocols by using them to build a grid of Bluetooth devices. We also used Bluetooth grid to compare the performance of our service discovery protocol with other similar protocols. Results indicate that our discovery protocol strikes a balance between the compared protocols in terms of resource discovery time and expressiveness of resource description. This allows the protocol to support sophisticated resource brokering and scheduling techniques without incurring prohibitive overheads. Furthermore, in contrast to the existing protocols our protocol supports service advertisements. This facilitates more efficient handling of dynamic situations such as devices leaving and joining the grid.

The Internet has evolved into a multi-service infrastructure for the telecom and computer industries. Internet services are affected by congestions caused by the operations of Internet routing protocols. We propose a novel information service that guides the operations of Internet routing protocols to avoid such congestion. The information service maintains information about utilization of inter-domain links. The proposed service minimizes the maximum of utilization of Internet links by selecting potential network domains to be traversed by Internet services. Simulation results show better balanced distribution of traffic workloads among network links using the proposed service. We show that the proposed service scales well as network size grows. This comes at the cost of greater control messaging overhead which suggests using the proposed service with long-lived and higher bandwidth services

This paper describes a scalable and hierarchical virtual network creation (HVNC) protocol. The protocol encapsulates network control operations such as signaling and routing. It relies on a hierarchical organization of network resources and their managers. The network hierarchy of HVNC provides network-wide views of network resource status. This enables network-wide decisions such as balancing traffic loads among network domains and traffic isolation in accordance to policies. HVNC enables flexible and dynamic virtual network management including reconfiguration and failure recovery. These advantages come at the cost of higher setup and information storage costs when compared to standard service creation protocols. We characterize the advantages and costs of HVNC by simulation. The relatively high costs of HVNC make it more suitable to create long-lived high-bandwidth virtual networks. This type of virtual networks supports emerging technologies and applications such as grid and peer-to-peer computing and data-intensive e-science applications

The paper presents a novel scalable end-to-end routing protocol, HDRA, which combines the characteristics of both hierarchical and distributed routing protocols. HDRA selects a number of network domains to be traversed by a requested route. Only the selected domains are flooded with probing messages. This enables the deployment of flooding-based routing algorithms in large networks. The protocol has smaller setup time because it performs no central routing computation. HDRA does not require global state maintenance. However, it has higher message overheads when compared to PNNI (private network-network interface).

Network service provisioning involves the control of network resources through signaling, routing and management protocols that achieve quality of service and traffic engineering objectives. Network service providers are typically faced with scalability problems due to the explosion in network size and demand. In this paper we propose a new hierarchical distributed protocol for the provisioning of MPLS-based tunnels. The protocol encapsulates the required signaling and routing. The protocol alleviates the scalability problem through extending the current two-tier architecture of the Internet to a multi-level hierarchical one. It enables mechanisms for quality of service, and intra- and inter-domain traffic engineering. Analytical analysis and simulation results show that the protocol exploits parallelism in routing computation to reduce the setup time of an MPLS path. This comes at the expense of an increased message complexity relative to other hierarchical protocols.

One of the goals of network service providers (SP) is to provision efficiently value-added networking services to their end users. The services may have different duration, connectivity, and quality of service (QoS) requirements. An SP meets such requirements by exploiting various routing and management mechanisms for edge and core networks. We focus on network services that require the establishment of virtual networks (VNs). This paper considers a VN creation architecture based on multi-protocol label switching (MPLS). MPLS is one approach for implementing VNs that enables programmability for network infrastructure and hence the creation of value-added services. An analytic performance model is developed to assess the scalability of the architecture as the underlying physical network infrastructure evolves. The model we present describes only coarse features of the architecture, yet offers insights regarding its performance and scalability. In particular we assess the impact of a flat versus hierarchical MPLS mechanism on the response time of service creation.

Mobile agents, equipped with intelligence, provide a relatively new technology that will help automate network management activities, which are becoming increasingly data-intensive, thus demanding more direct human manager expertise and involvement. The research reported in this paper is concerned with the design of an intelligent mobile agent, which accomplishes a set of network management tasks delegated to it from the human manager. The agent exploits the mobile code technology to roam the network from one node to another, accessing information from each node, processing this information at each node locally, and carrying the results of this processing during the migration. The agent possesses intelligence that allows it to carry out the tasks without involving the human manager. The objective is to present the manager with a set of conclusions or recommendations rather than large volumes of raw alarm data. This paper focuses on applying an intelligent mobile agent to automate simple fault management tasks and proposes a framework for realizing this automation.