Infrastructures in Vehicular Communications: Status, Challenges and Perspectives

I. Introduction

Vehicular communication is an emergent technology that has recently deserve attention of both industry and academic institutions all over the world, notably, in United States of America, Japan and Europe for the development of ITS. The main idea behind ITS is not new since JSK (Association of Electronic Technology for Automobile Traffic and Driving of Japan) was instantiated to work on vehicular communications in the early 1980s. However, the formal development process in the United States of America began in 1990s when the United States Congress mandated the creation of a program called Intelligent Vehicle Highway System (IVHS) based on Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency act of 1991 (ISTEA), whose main goal was to improve road safety, efficiency, comfort and quality of everyday life reducing possible pollution and preserving fuel while traveling on the road. The main responsibility of IVHS was assigned to the U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT), which required the advice of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITSA).

Recently well-known research results on platooning have been demonstrated by California PATH project of USA (Alvarez & Horowitz, 1997) and Chauffeur of EU. Vehicular communication is regarded as a major component for ITS to enhance passenger comfort, traffic efficiency, safety of passengers and so on, by propagating and disseminating the information in a timely and accurate manner towards the region of interest with an aim of automating existing transportation system which will rely on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) with possible intermediate infrastructure-to-infrastructure (I2I) communications. Conventional solutions to these issues use mainly automatic control systems using on board unit (OBU) in individual vehicles without any interaction to other vehicles, however, recently proposed vehicular communication could help to make the coordination among participating vehicles more efficiently and effectively with the help of inter-vehicle communication using V2V and/or V2I communications.

Generally speaking, there are four basic types of information or messages that are exchanged among vehicles in vehicular communications:

• •

  Emergency and warning messages: These types of messages can be of critical emergency, construction sites, or congestion related messages.

• •

  Routing and basic safety messages: This category consists of information used by routing protocols and driving conditions. Information related to sender vehicle’s speed, position, direction, identity and so on are some examples.

• •

  Infotainment (information and entertainment) messages: These types of messages are basically related to recourses and services available on the roadside, and/or the services offered by other participating vehicles on the road. Information for nearby gas stations, restaurants, and so on are the example of this category.

• •

  Inter-personal messages: This category may contain messages related to a profile of a driver and other passengers on the vehicle.