Intelligent data transportation in smart cities: A spectrum-aware approach

Communication technologies supply the blood for smart city applications. In view of the ever-increasing wireless traffic generated in smart cities and our already congested radio access networks (RANs), we have recently designed a data transportation network, the vehicular cognitive capability harvesting network (V-CCHN), which exploits the harvested spectrum opportunity and the mobility opportunity offered by the massive number of vehicles traveling in the city to not only offload delay-tolerant data from congested RANs but also support delay-tolerant data transportation for various smart-city applications. To make data transportation efficient, in this paper, we develop a spectrum-aware (SA) data transportation scheme based on Markov decision processes. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that, with the developed data transportation scheme, the V-CCHN is effective in offering data transportation services despite its dependence on dynamic resources, such as vehicles and harvested spectrum resources. The simulation results also demonstrate the superiority of the SA scheme over existing schemes. We expect the V-CCHN to well complement existing telecommunication networks in handling the exponentially increasing wireless data traffic.