Fail Silent Road Side Unit for Vehicular Communications

After almost a decade of R&D, vehicular communications for cooperative systems and its enabling technologies, mostly relying on IEEE 802.11p and IEEE 1609.1-4 family of standards, are in their trial phase, as some major field operational tests are being carried out. Nevertheless, there are still some open problems concerning the timeliness, dependability and security of IEEE 802.11p based communications. This paper presents an architecture to implement fail-silent road side units (RSU) required to deploy infrastructure to vehicle (I2V) safety communications. Although generic, the proposed architecture is described within the scope of the Vehicular Flexible Time-Triggered protocol (V-FTT) and takes advantage of a flexible, FPGA-based softcore implementation of an IEEE 802.11-A6 / ETSI ITS G5 controller.