High-Throughput Infrastructure for Advanced ITS Services: A Case Study on Air Pollution Monitoring

Novel cooperative intelligent transportation systems (ITS) serve as the basis for the provision of a number of services for drivers, occupants, and third parties. The vast amount of information to be collected, especially in vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication services, requires new algorithms and hardware platforms to cope with real-time requirements; however, this combination is not properly addressed in the literature. In this paper, we introduce a high-throughput hardware-software infrastructure to gather information from vehicles and efficiently process it to provide novel ITS services. We propose a parallelization approach of a fuzzy clustering technique on heterogeneous servers based on CPU and several GPUs, tailored to classification problems in V2I. The infrastructure is empirically tested to offer a geo-located pollution information service through the periodical collection of both vehicle's position and status data. We offer a real service that correctly identifies highly polluting traffic areas and drivers. The results indicate a good performance of the system under high loads, and our scalability analysis reveals a good operation in real-ambitious deployments thanks to the use of the both CPU and multiple GPUs, showing that our proposal can efficiently host cooperative services involving high processing in the ITS context.