Dimensioning Study for Road User Charging

Road User Charging (RUC) solutions based on the concept of thin clients rely upon timely delivery of Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGV) positions towards a RUC provider, which then performs the map matching and the calculation of the road user charges. In order to avoid data loss and late delivery, a proper dimensioning of the system is required. For the Swedish case, we investigate the feasibility of legacy mobile and wireless systems (in particular GPRS, UMTS and WLAN) for both streaming and bulk transfer of positioning data, and we determine sensible combinations of sampling and reporting intervals in terms of efficient and economic reporting. We also highlight a couple of traps regarding the dimensioning, in particular of sending patterns that might cause overload at the server side of the system. It becomes obvious that mobile networks can well cope with the extra load caused by reporting HGVs, while bulk transfer in wireless hot-spots can be used as a complementary solution.