Yousef AlSaqabi

Yousef AlSaqabi, Bhaskar Krishnamachari

With recent advancements in the field of communications and the Internet of Things, vehicles are becoming more aware of their environment and are evolving towards full autonomy. Vehicular communication opens up the possibility for vehicle-to-infrastructure interaction, where vehicles could share information with components such as cameras, traffic lights, and signage that support a countrys road system. As a result, vehicles are becoming more than just a means of transportation; they are collecting, processing, and transmitting massive amounts of data used to make driving safer and more convenient. With 5G cellular networks and beyond, there is going to be more data bandwidth available on our roads, but it may be heterogeneous because of limitations like line of sight, infrastructure, and heterogeneous traffic on the road. This paper addresses the problem of route planning for autonomous vehicles in urban areas accounting for both driving time and data transfer needs. We propose a novel reinforcement learning solution that prioritizes high bandwidth roads to meet a vehicles data transfer requirement, while also minimizing driving time. We compare this approach to traffic-unaware and bandwidth-unaware baselines to show how much better it performs under heterogeneous traffic. This solution could be used as a starting point to understand what good policies look like, which could potentially yield faster, more efficient heuristics in the future.

Yousef AlSaqabi

As vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) deployments scale, roadside units (RSUs) that consume 10-25W continuously yet serve negligible traffic during off-peak hours represent a growing source of energy waste. Sleep scheduling can exploit the pronounced diurnal variation in urban traffic, but the WAVE service restoration overhead of up to 100ms nearly exhausts the 3GPPTS~22.185 latency budget, making independent sleep decisions risky. This paper proposes a cooperative framework in which upstream RSUs share traffic detection signals with downstream neighbors via infrastructure-to-infrastructure links, enabling predictive wake-up that exploits spatial correlation between adjacent intersections. The framework is formulated as a constrained Markov decision process and decomposed into per-RSU subproblems solvable by value iteration. Four algorithms of increasing sophistication are evaluated on real hourly traffic data from four consecutive signalized intersections in Kuwait City, comprising a total of 762,050 vehicles over five days. The cooperative algorithm reduces corridor energy consumption by 59.5% relative to always-on operation while maintaining 99% latency compliance, and provides 7.7 percentage points of additional savings over independent per-RSU optimization at downstream RSUs with spatial correlation \r{ho} >= 0.97. Extrapolated to a 200-RSU urban deployment, the cooperative approach yields an estimated 5.25 tonnes of CO2 reduction per year.

Yousef AlSaqabi

ETSI Decentralized Congestion Control (DCC) limits roadside unit (RSU) broadcast rates based on channel load, yet its impact on age of information (AoI) for vehicle-to-infrastructure updates remains uncharacterized under real traffic. We derive the AoI of DCC-constrained V2I broadcast, revealing a hyperbolic density dependence that induces diurnal AoI variation exceeding 4 times on a four-RSU corridor, with the DCC target CBR parameter as the dominant control. We propose a cooperative policy exploiting upstream spatial traffic correlation to improve channel load estimation, with a safeguard ensuring non-negative gains. Evaluated on a 5-day, 762,050-vehicle trace from Kuwait City, the policy reduces corridor AoI by 5% at moderate and up to 66% at conservative DCC settings.

Yousef AlSaqabi

Urban traffic congestion remains a persistent challenge in car-dependent cities, imposing significant economic and societal costs. Traffic signal systems are increasingly deployed as networked cyber-physical components within smart-city infrastructures, where distributed sensing and edge intelligence enable adaptive traffic management. This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) as an edge-intelligent approach for adaptive traffic signal operation at a signalized urban intersection in Kuwait. A Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)-based controller is developed to dynamically allocate green-phase durations using locally observed traffic states, without relying on future demand information or centralized coordination. The controller is evaluated in a realistic simulation environment informed by real-world hourly traffic volume data from Kuwait, and is compared against both conventional fixed-time control and a vehicle-actuated controller representing the current state of practice, using average vehicle delay, queue length, and emissions as performance metrics. Under nominal conditions, the proposed controller reduces average vehicle delay by 46% relative to fixed-time control and 34% relative to actuated control, while also lowering per-vehicle CO2 emissions by approximately 23%. These performance gains persist under demand perturbations of +/-15%, generalize from weekday to weekend traffic patterns, and are corroborated by a reward function ablation; low variance across five random seeds confirms their statistical reliability. These findings demonstrate the practicality of learning-based edge traffic signal control as a building block for IoT-enabled smart-city transportation systems, and as a deployable precursor toward fully connected, Internet of Vehicles (IoV)-based urban mobility.

Yousef AlSaqabi, Yinan Zhou, Faisal Nawab et al.

We present a novel game-theoretic framework designed to enhance privacy and scalability in decentralized vehicular data collection systems. The proposed hybrid architecture comprises vehicles that supply sensor data, independent servers that process data via secure multiparty computation, a coordinator node that manages data flow, and data consumers that set economic incentives. Crucially, our framework ensures that only the data consumer can access the fully aggregated data, preventing individual raw data exposure and significantly reducing privacy risks. By integrating principles of the Stackelberg competition from game theory, our approach dynamically balances privacy and economic incentives, enabling vehicles to make participation decisions based on perceived privacy risks and incentives. We empirically validate our framework using real-world vehicular location data, quantifying privacy risks by evaluating the accuracy with which a potential adversary can reconstruct a vehicle's path using only a subset of the shared data. This paper details the development and deployment of a data-trading platform within this framework, introducing a practical and privacy-preserving marketplace for profitable vehicle data sharing. Through experiments and simulations, we evaluate the effectiveness of the system in preserving privacy and explore the dynamics that influence vehicle participation. Our findings highlight the robustness of the proposed framework in preserving privacy while supporting an active data market.