Vehicular Networking Pilot System for Vehicle-to-Infrastructure and Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

Modern society is built on good roads and efficient transportation systems. Road safety has become the primary development issue within road infrastructures. Safety and mobility can, however, be jeopardized by poor highway design and construction or by operating procedures which allow unsafe driving conditions e.g. construction work zones, incident management or response to emergencies caused by adverse weather. During recent years weather conditions in winter, especially when rapidly changing, have been an important factor behind numerous disastrous traffic accidents in northern regions of Europe and America as well as in the Alpine region in Europe. Information about hazardous weather conditions is often potentially available but difficult, or sometimes even impossible, to deliver to the drivers in the target area. Without a procedure to deliver instant accident and incident warnings directly to vehicles, accidents (and traffic accidents in general) can quickly change into a chain event. The Carlink project was established to overcome such information gap and to provide guidance to drivers. In the Carlink project we have developed a wireless traffic service platform between vehicles, supported with roadside base stations. The platform is open for any kind of third-party services, but with the project team we have generated several specific services especially tailored to improve traffic safety. The final goal is to enhance traffic safety and smoothness, but also to generate a completely new communication entity, allowing for a new type of applications, services and business opportunities. All this requires a smoothly operating wireless communication platform supporting both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. In this paper we briefly present the concept of the platform and pilot system deployment, and concentrate on the wireless vehicular networking dilemma. Traditional wireless networking systems are designed for an office environment, completely different than a vehicular network of fast-moving objects. We have chosen the upcoming IEEE 802.11p vehicular networking standard as the final solution, but we have used the IEEE 802.11g standard Wi-Fi networking system as a current operational solution. In this paper it is shown, that despite the deficiencies of IEEE 802.11g in a vehicular communication environment, when working together with a GPRS alternate communication channel, it can provide a reliable and efficient vehicular networking solution for a Carlink type of wireless communication platform. We have developed wireless traffic service platform to enhance traffic safety and operation. Our pilot system has proven the basic functionality; the operability can only be seen ultimately in an operative, commercially deployed platform. The presented approach represents a candidate solution for a comprehensive vehicular communication entity for enhancing traffic safety.