Construction of large-scale low-cost delivery infrastructure using vehicular networks

Vehicular ad-hoc networks, as one of the major components of Internet of Things in smart cities, have enormous idle transportation capability due to the huge number of vehicles. This paper argues that it is feasible to employ a large number of mobile vehicles in smart city to construct a large-scale low-cost delivery infrastructure using opportunistic routing to improve the city's social welfare. To this end, a low-cost good delivery system (LCGDS) with opportunistic relay is proposed to meet the requirements of good delivery. In LCGDS, an enormous number of mobile vehicles constitute a stable, highly reliable, low-cost infrastructure with large transportation capabilities, called the mobile Internet of mission-critical things (M-IoMCT). The main contributions of the LCGDS are: 1) demonstrate the technological feasibility of M-IoMCT for delivering goods through mobile vehicles in a “ride-sharing” fashion with low costs and 2) in order to increase the reliability of goods transmission, the LCGDS proposes mobile vehicle selection algorithm which effectively selects a vehicle with higher probability of arriving at the destination. Both theoretical and experimental simulation results show that the performance of the LCGDS outperforms those of other solutions. Compared with other solutions, our results demonstrate that the costs in the LCGDS are only about 24% of the costs in the origin goods transmission scheme.

Vehicular ad-hoc networks, as one of the major components of Internet of Things in smart cities, have enormous idle transportation capability due to the huge number of vehicles. This paper argues that it is feasible to employ a large number of mobile vehicles in smart city to construct a large-scale low-cost delivery infrastructure using opportunistic routing to improve the city's social welfare. To this end, a low-cost good delivery system (LCGDS) with opportunistic relay is proposed to meet the requirements of good delivery. In LCGDS, an enormous number of mobile vehicles constitute a stable, highly reliable, low-cost infrastructure with large transportation capabilities, called the mobile Internet of mission-critical things (M-IoMCT). The main contributions of the LCGDS are: 1) demonstrate the technological feasibility of M-IoMCT for delivering goods through mobile vehicles in a “ride-sharing” fashion with low costs and 2) in order to increase the reliability of goods transmission, the LCGDS proposes mobile vehicle selection algorithm which effectively selects a vehicle with higher probability of arriving at the destination. Both theoretical and experimental simulation results show that the performance of the LCGDS outperforms those of other solutions. Compared with other solutions, our results demonstrate that the costs in the LCGDS are only about 24% of the costs in the origin goods transmission scheme.