VShare: A Wireless Social Network Aided Vehicle Sharing System Using Hierarchical Cloud Architecture

Carpool commuting enables multiple individual travelers with similar schedules and itineraries to share a common vehicle during a trip, and travelers can split travel costs in gas, parking and tolls with each other. It emerges as an effective way to solve traffic congestion, parking space tension and air pollution resulting from vehicle emissions. One of the challenges that restrict widespread adoption of carpool commuting lies in matching carpoolers. Existing carpooler matching methods include building carpool lanes in main airports and bus stops, using centralized servers to identify carpoolers based on historical travel data or real time travel requests. However, these methods cannot be applied to large scale adoption or incur long matching latency. To overcome drawbacks of existing methods, we propose VShare, a dynamic carpool system that leverages the wireless social network characteristic and hierarchical cloud server architecture. VShare incorporates two design components: matching through the wireless social network and a hierarchical cloud server structure. Upon receiving a user travel request, VShare first identifies possible carpoolers from neighbors in nearby locations, which reduces latency of sending travel requests to remote servers. If no carpool is found within nearby locations, a hierarchical cloud server architecture is used to match the travel requests. We have implemented the design of VShare and conducted trace-driven experiments. Experimental results show the effectiveness of VShare in substantially reducing matching latency while providing high success rate in matching carpollers.