VeMail: A message handling system towards efficient transportation management

In this paper, we propose an electronic mail system, namely VeMail, for handling messages between vehicles and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), to improve the efficiency of transportation management. After elaborating the reasons of using Internet email as a basis of messaging for ITS, we describe the key components of the VeMail system, including mail server, mail client, and mail proxy. Considering the intermittent connectivity of vehicles to the mail server, we propose an optimal probabilistic message retrieval (OPMR) scheme for VeMail, in which each vehicle optimally selects an online period for email retrieval. Simulation is used to evaluate the performance and the results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the regular mail retrieval method in terms of the connection time with the mail server.