UCLA

Classical transportation systems have been suffering from inefficiency in utilizing road capacity and incapability of guaranteeing safety due to inconsistent and unpredictable human based manipulations. This long standing issue is expected to be resolved through the introduction of vehicular autonomy, along with a properly configured traffic management system and an underlying communication network that supports the dissemination of safety and control messages. However, mechanisms to be used in the regulation of autonomous vehicles are yet to be developed.

For the first part of the dissertation, we propose an efficient data dissemination protocol, identified as Vehicular Backbone Network (VBN), which support high throughput and low delay message delivery across a Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET). Vehicles are elected as relay nodes at properly selected nominal positions to optimize system throughput rate with guaranteed outage probability. The proposed VBN mechanism is analyzed under different Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols and various stochastic traffic flow conditions.

In the second part of the dissertation, we go beyond the statistical vehicular traffic model

and present our study of a platoon-based autonomous vehicular traffic regulation system. The traffic management system, serving to configure vehicles into platoons and regulating the on-ramp access of vehicular flows into the highway, is integrated with a design of a VANET system. The latter provides for the communications of essential message flows among highway vehicles. The fundamental tradeoffs that need to be made in designing the autonomous systems are modeled and studied. We propose an optimization framework to be used in designing the traffic control system in a manner that meet throughput and latency performance metrics across the vehicular mobility and the message communications networking dimensions of the overall system. We also study the design of a core network that employs Road Side Units (RSUs) that provide communications networking support in disseminating message flows to/from and among highway vehicles.