Special issue: Connected Vehicles meet Big Data technologies: Recent Advances and Future Trends

Abstract

Nowadays, connected vehicles are able to collect up to 170 measurements (speed, temperature, fuel consumption, etc.) from on board built-in sensors and transmit them to an infrastructure, usually by 4G/5G wireless communications. This raises many opportunities to develop new and innovative telematics services including, among others, driver safety, customer experience, location-based services, dealer services, infotainment, etc. It is expected that there will be roughly 2 billion connected cars by the end of 2025 on the world’s roadways, where each of which can produce up to 30 terabytes of data each day. This huge amount of data, whereas it offers interesting commercial opportunities, it emphasizes however the development of sophisticated computation frameworks, in particular parallel and distributed ones, for collecting, gathering and analyzing the generated data. Most notable, among the challenges facing connected vehicles applications, is the infrastructure’s ability of real-time or near real time processing in order to enable new and innovative services. In fact, a broad range of applications, more precisely safety application (e.g., early alert on the presence of freezing rain on roads), is based on a new emerging communication paradigm, known as “car-to-car communication via infrastructure”. The performance, and even the existence, of this paradigm is highly dependent on the infrastructure’s ability to collect information, process and gather it and finally deliver it (i.e., sending back) to cars within acceptable delays. Even the latter depend on the target applications, they are mostly required to be very short to meet real-time or near real-time delays. This is true specifically for safety applications.