The growth in the number of mobile devices today result in an increasing demand for large amount of rich content to support numerous applications. It is however challenging for the current cellular networks to deal with such increasing demand, both in terms of cost and bandwidth that are necessary to handle the “massive” content generated and consumed by mobile users in an urban environment. This is partly due to the connection-centric nature of current mobile systems. Alternatively, the technological advancement in modern vehicles allow us to harness their computing, caching and communication capabilities to supplement infrastructure network while enabling numerous location-based services towards city smartification. It is now imaginable to recruit connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to collect, store and share heterogeneous data on urban streets in order to provide citizens with a various set of such services. In this talk, our aim is to present some of our past results and future research directions on how to efficiently collect and store contents by and within the vehicles themselves in the vicinity of the consumers, aka the urban mobile user, while reducing bandwidth demand and cost. Hence, we will briefly discuss the necessity to define novel centrality metrics, based on the social interest of urban users, to identify and select the appropriate set of best candidate vehicles to perform urban data sensing and collection in a distributed way. Then, we show how complex networks principles and game-theoretic approaches can be leveraged in order to realize a social-aware data storage system to perform collaborative content caching in an urban environment. Discussing how such solutions, necessitating no infrastructure support, could allow novel usages at smart city’s scale will conclude the talk.

Yacine Ghamri-Doudane is currently Full Professor at the La Rochelle University in France, and the Director of its Laboratory of Informatics, Image and Interaction, L3i (~120 members + ~30 interns per year). Since January 2019, he also holds an Adjunct Professor position at the Walton Institute for Information and Communication Systems Science, South-East Technological University, SETU, Waterford, Ireland. Yacine received an engineering degree in computer science (M.Eng) from the National Institute of Informatics (INI), Algiers, Algeria, in 1998, an M.Sc. degree in signal, image and speech processing from the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA), Lyon, France, in 1999, a Ph.D. degree in computer networks from University Pierre & Marie Curie, Paris 6, France, in 2003, and a Habilitation to Supervise Research (HDR) in Computer Science from Université Paris-Est, in 2010. His current research interests lay in the area of wireless networking and mobile computing with a current emphasis on topics related to the Internet of Things (IoT), Connected and Autonomous Vehicles, Edge Computing Systems, 5G and Beyond as well as Digital Trust. Yacine holds three (3) international patents and he authored or co-authored eight (8) book chapters, about 51 peer-reviewed international journal articles and about 179 peer-reviewed full conference and workshop papers. Since 1999, he participated or still participates to several national and European-wide research projects in his area of interests. Among them five regional research projects (three ongoing), five national-wide research projects (two ongoing), fourteen European-wide or International-wide research projects (four on-going) as well as three EU COST Actions. He also held several industrial funding with companies like Orange, Nokia, Renault, OODrive, Soft@Home (Orange Group) and PANGA. As part of his professional activities linked to the computer networking research community, Yacine also acts as the Chair of the IEEE Smart Cities Technical Community 2.0 Meetings and Conferences Committee since May 2022. He acted as the Chair of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Technical Committee on Information Infrastructure & Networking (TCIIN – previously TCII) from January 2010 till December 2013 and also chaired the IEEE ComSoc Humanitarian Communications Technologies Ad hoc Committee (HCTC) from January 2012 till December 2015. He was also part of the IEEE Smart Cities Initiative Steering Committee from 2014 to 2017 as well as since 2022. He is or had been an editorial board member of the IEEE TVT (ongoing), Elsevier JNCA, Elsevier ComNet, Springer AoT Journals, Wiley WCMC, Guest Editor of IEEE ComMag, IEEE IoT Journal, Springer/EURASIP WCN Journal, co-Editor in Chief of the Elsevier/KICS ICT Express Journal (ongoing) as well as the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE ComSoc Ad Hoc and Sensor Network Technical Committee (AHSN TC) Newsletter. Among other conference involvements, he acted or is still currently acting as the TPC Chair of IEEE LatinCom 2022, IEEE MeditCom 2021, IEEE/IFIP IM 2021, and IEEE CCNC 2015, Symposium co-Chair in IEEE ICC 2009, 2010, 2012, 2018 and 2021 as well as IEEE GLOBECOM 2012 and 2015, Workshop co-Chair for IEEE GLOBECOM 2023 and finally Track co-Chair in IEEE CCNC 2023 and 2024 as well as in IEEE Sensors 2022 and 2023. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE. (CV & Bio:http://goo.gl/6wnUvJ)