Aktiv-CoCar - Improving driving safety with 3G cellular networks

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Aktiv-CoCar - Improving driving safety with 3G cellular networks

Gehlen, Guido

The ability of improving safety and efficiency of current transportation system makes Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) or Car-to-Car (C2C) communication technology an essential component of future Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) worldwide. So far, most of the research efforts are focusing on the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) based C2C technology, e.g. the IEEE Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) system. The WAVE system is able to provide local communications with very low latency and short to medium communication range, which are perfect for local active safety applications, such as vehicle manoeuvring assistance or cooperative automatic cruise control. However, in most of the European countries there would be hardly any roadside equipment planned due to the already deployed 5.8 GHz European Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) system for electronic toll collection. In order to reach a high market penetration rate of C2C devices without the help of road-side infrastructure would be tough, very cost-intensive and slow. The development of C2C communication is, therefore, challenging in Europe and its questionable if a dedicated WAVE based roadside communication infrastructure will be deployed. Fortunately, cellular communication systems, e.g. GPRS, UMTS/HSPA and in future LTE, in Europe have been well developed with substantially high coverage rate and user population providing even fast broadband services to high mobile devices.