Being able to obtain various environmental and driving data from vehicles is becoming more and more important for current and future intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) to operate efficiently and economically. However, the limitations of privacy protection and security of the current ITSs are hindering users and vehicles from providing data. In this paper, we propose a new ITS architecture by using blockchain technology solving the privacy protection and security problems, and promoting users and vehicles to provide data to ITSs. The proposed architecture uses blockchain as a trust infrastructure to protect users’ privacy and provide trustworthy services to users. It is also compatible with the legacy ITS infrastructure and services. In addition, the hierarchical organization of chains enables the scalability of the system, and the use of smart contracts provides a flexible way for introducing new services in the ITS. The proposed architecture is demonstrated by a proof of concept implementation based on Ethereum. The test results show that the proposed architecture is feasible.

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects smart devices to enable various intelligent services. The deployment of IoT encounters several challenges, such as difficulties in controlling and managing IoT applications and networks, problems in programming existing IoT devices, long service provisioning time, underused resources, as well as complexity, isolation and scalability, among others. One fundamental concern is that current IoT networks lack flexibility and intelligence. A network-wide flexible control and management are missing in IoT networks. In addition, huge numbers of devices and large amounts of data are involved in IoT, but none of them have been tuned for supporting network management and control. In this paper, we argue that Software-defined Networking (SDN) together with the data generated by IoT applications can enhance the control and management of IoT in terms of flexibility and intelligence. We present a review for the evolution of SDN and IoT and analyze the benefits and challenges brought by the integration of SDN and IoT with the help of IoT data. We discuss the perspectives of knowledge-driven SDN for IoT through a new IoT architecture and illustrate how to realize Industry IoT by using the architecture. We also highlight the challenges and future research works toward realizing IoT with the knowledge-driven SDN.

Information-centric networking (ICN) technology matches many major requirements of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) in terms of its connectionless networking paradigm accordant with the dynamic environments of VANETs and is increasingly being applied to VANETs. However, wireless transmissions of packets in VANETs using ICN mechanisms can lead to broadcast storms and channel contention, severely affecting the performance of data dissemination. At the same time, frequent changes of topology due to driving at high speeds and environmental obstacles can also lead to link interruptions when too few vehicles are involved in data forwarding. Hence, balancing the number of forwarding vehicular nodes and the number of copies of packets that are forwarded is essential for improving the performance of data dissemination in information-centric networking for vehicular ad-hoc networks. In this paper, we propose a context-aware packet-forwarding mechanism for ICN-based VANETs. The relative geographical position of vehicles, the density and relative distribution of vehicles, and the priority of content are considered during the packet forwarding. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can improve the performance of data dissemination in ICN-based VANET in terms of a successful data delivery ratio, packet loss rate, bandwidth usage, data response time, and traversed hops.

With the increase of the networking functions of the mobile handheld devices, today there is a strong need for receiving multimedia through mobile handheld devices. However, the current streaming technologies cannot well satisfy the users' need due to the large network bandwidth requirement and high price. And the infrastructure of broadcasting oriented for a mobile handheld device, such as DVB-H, are not yet popular in the daily life. Based on these considerations, a new multimedia and information service gateway is proposed, where novel multimedia and information services can be well provided to users with mobile devices. The gateway can connect DVB network, Internet, IPTV etc. media and content provisioning networks with the local area networks such as WLAN and LAN, as well as 3G cellular networks and WiMax which provide access to mobile and portable devices. The gateway aggregates media and Internet information and then distributes them via different access networks to mobile users. The most important feature of the gateway is that it has introduced the idea of the autonomic communications to solve the key problems for providing multimedia services like the video quality and the heterogeneity of mobile devices. Two control loops are designed in the gateway, based on which the autonomic source media transcoding and the dual-driven autonomic channel transcoding techniques are realized. Hence, the gateway system can adapt itself to the varying environments and can therefore provide better multimedia services to users. In general, the gateway can realize the following functions: sending multimedia to individual mobile devices with suitable format, size, and resolution multicasting multimedia to a group of mobile devices broadcasting multimedia to the mobile devices in the local area providing various information services to users through “push” or “pull” Especially, the gateway has the following three autonomic features: autonomic user management: i.e., it can obtain the users context information automatically and deal with users' subscription of the services autonomic source media transcoding: i.e., it can adapt the format of the multimedia data received from the media provisioning network according to the capability of the receivers' devices autonomic channel coding: i.e., it can adapt the coding parameters for the video transmission within WLAN by monitoring the status of the network and the receivers Simulation and test results show that the proposed service gateway can provide a new solution for multimedia and information service provisioning.