Intelligent Transport Systems

4 The Case for Wireless Vehicular Communications Supported by Roadside Infrastructure

Tiago Meireles¹, José Fonseca² and Joaquim Ferreira³

¹ Instituto de Telecomunicações, Universidade da Madeira, Portugal

² Instituto de Telecomunicações, DETI-Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal

³ Instituto de Telecomunicações, ESTGA-Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal

4.1 Introduction

Wireless vehicular networks for cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) have raised widespread interest in the last few years, due to their potential applications and services. Cooperative applications with data sensing, acquisition, processing and communication provide an unprecedented potential to improve vehicle and road safety, passengers’ comfort and efficiency of traffic management.

In order to support such visionary scenarios, applications running in the vehicles are required to communicate with other applications in other vehicles or with applications deployed in the back office of the emergency services, road operators or public services. These applications run unattended, reporting information and taking commands from counterpart applications in the vehicle or network.

The mobile units of a vehicular network are the equivalent to nodes in a traditional wireless network, and can act as the source, destination or router of information. Communication between mobile nodes can be point-to-point, point-to-multipoint or broadcast, depending on the requirements of each application. Besides the ad-hoc ...