CarPal: Interconnecting overlay networks for a community-driven shared mobility

Abstract

Car sharing and car pooling have proven to be an effective solution to reduce the amount of running vehicles by increasing the number of passengers per car amongst medium/big communities, like schools or enterprises. However, the success of such practice relies on the ability of the community to effectively share and retrieve information about travelers and itineraries. Structured overlay networks, such as Chord, have emerged recently as a flexible solution to handle large amounts of data without the use of high-end servers, in a decentralized manner. In this paper we present CarPal, a proof-of-concept for a mobility sharing application that leverages a Distributed Hash Table to allow a community of people to spontaneously share trip information, without the costs of a centralized structure. Moreover the peer-to-peer architecture allows for deployment on portable devices, and opens new scenarios in which trips and sharing requests can be updated in real time. By using an already developed original protocol that allows to interconnect different overlays/communities, the success rate (number of shared rides) can be boosted up, thus increasing the effectiveness of our solution. Simulations results are shown to give a possible estimate of this effectiveness. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.