Topic：Feel Bored? Joint Verse! Engineering Vehicular Proximity Social Networks

Time：2013年4月12日 上午10:30-11:30

Venue：信电大楼-225学术厅

Speaker：Dr.  Tom Hao Luan  University of Waterloo

Biography

Dr. Tom Hao Luan received the B.E. degree from Xi’an Jiaotong University, Shaanxi, China in 2004, the Master of Philosophy degree from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong in 2007, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in 2012. His current research is focused on the content distribution and media streaming in vehicular ad hoc networks, wireless cloud computing, Fog Computing and peer-to-peer streaming and networking. Until 2013, Dr. Luan has published 12 journal papers including IEEE Transaction on Mobile Computing, Multimedia, Vehicular Technology, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, and 11 technical papers in conference proceedings, including IEEE/ACM Infocom, IEEE/ACM IWQoS, IEEE SECON. Dr. Luan has one US patent granted and been awarded the Chinese Government Scholarship for Outstanding Self-financed Students Studying Abroad in 2012.

Abstract

Passengers in vehicles usually have the willingness to share their travel experience and exchange information with others through social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. This, however, is not practical or very costly in the outdoor environment due to the limited connections to the Internet. To facilitate social communications of fleet passengers on the highways, in this talk, we introduce Verse, a vehicular social platform. Verse enables passengers on-board vehicles to share the content information, such as travel blogs with pictures, among each other using the wireless inter-vehicle communications. Unlike traditional online social networks, e.g., Facebook, which are built upon reliable IP networks, the vehicular social networks face fundamental challenges: 1) users are unknown to each other and difficult to locate potential friends with shared interests, and 2) social friends are connected through the highly dynamic, spotty and intermittent inter-vehicle connections, making the social communications unreliable. On addressing these challenges, it is crucial for Verse to 1) explore the shared interests between anonymous users, and 2) establish the long-lasting wireless connections between them. Towards this goal, we device a friend recommendation function in Verse which helps passengers to explore the potential social friends with the shared social interests and meanwhile stable inter-vehicle connections. In addition, to fully utilize the network bandwidth to promote effective social communications, Verse is equipped with a social-aware transmission controller which adapts the transmission rates of vehicles based on the social impacts of connections to the network. Lastly, using extensive simulations, we validate the performance of Verse.