A novel on-board Unit to accelerate the penetration of ITS services

In-vehicle connectivity has experienced a big expansion in recent years. Car manufacturers have mainly proposed OBU-based solutions, but these solutions do not take full advantage of the opportunities of inter-vehicle peer-to-peer communications. In this paper we introduce GRCBox, a novel architecture that allows OEM user-devices to directly communicate when located in neighboring vehicles. In this paper we also describe EYES, an application we developed to illustrate the type of novel applications that can be implemented on top of the GRCBox. EYES is an ITS overtaking assistance system that provides the driver with real-time video fed from the vehicle located in front. Finally, we evaluated the GRCbox and the EYES application and showed that, for device-to-device communication, the performance of the GRCBox architecture is comparable to an infrastructure network, introducing a negligible impact

Development and evaluation of smartphone-based ITS applications for vehicular networks

[ES] Una de las áreas de investigación que está recibiendo más atención recientemente es la de vehículos autónomos. Los investigadores están en este momento centrados en el tercer de los cinco niveles de autonomía, los cuales son: asistencia en la conducción, automatización parcial, automatización condicional, alta automatización y automatización completa. A pesar de los rápidos progresos que están habiendo en este campo, la adopción de estas soluciones llevará tiempo no sólo debido a cuestiones legales, sino también por el hecho de que los avances tecnológicos se enfrentan a un lento respaldo por parte de los fabricantes. Además, la baja tasa de renovación de vehículos de carretera, dificulta el despliegue de tecnologías innovadoras, como es el caso de la red vehicular. Ocho años después de la introducción de la norma 802.11p para la comunicación vehicular del Instituto de Ingenieros Eléctricos y Electrónicos (IIEE), los vehículos que se usan a diario todavía carecen de la capacidad de comunicarse entre sí. Este hecho impide el uso de las muchas aplicaciones de seguridad del Sistema de Inteligencia de Transporte (SIT) que aprovecha la red vehicular para el intercambio de datos. La forma obvia de manejar este problema es poner las tecnologías disponibles a la disposición de los usuarios comunes para desarrollar soluciones que se puedan implementar fácilmente y, además, económicas. Por esta razón, trasladamos nuestra atención a los dispositivos inteligentes, especialmente a los teléfonos inteligentes, los cuales han recorrido un largo camino desde la primera introducción de teléfonos móviles a finales del siglo XX. Hoy en día casi todos llevan uno en su bolsillo a donde sea que vayan, permitiéndoles no sólo hacer llamadas, sino también medir y controlar diferentes parámetros con la ayuda de los muchos sensores integrados que están disponibles para estos dispositivos compactos pero potentes. Nuestro objetivo es estudiar los efectos de la integración de los teléfonos inteligentes a la red vehicular para desarrollar aplicaciones de seguridad del SIT. La elección de los teléfonos inteligentes aquí no solo está justificada por su amplia disponibilidad y uso, sino también porque están evolucionando hacia terminales de alto rendimiento con microprocesadores de múltiples núcleos cargados dotados de un grupo suficientemente diverso de sensores. En esta tesis proponemos tres diferentes aplicaciones de seguridad SIT para teléfonos inteligentes, diseñados para aprovechar el entorno de red vehicular: una aplicación de generación de advertencia llamada Messiah que alerta a los conductores de la presencia de vehículos de emergencia en las cercanías; una aplicación de Advertencia de Colisión Frontal (ACF) que advierte a los conductores si no se mantiene la distancia de seguridad mínima entre el vehículo que va delante y el que lo sigue; y, por último, una aplicación que tiene como objetivo ayudar a los conductores con asistencia visual durante el adelantamiento, llamada EYES. Todas estas aplicaciones han sido desarrolladas para la plataforma Android, y dependen de la transmisión de datos entre vehículos. Dado que los vehículos que utilizamos día a día no admiten la posibilidad de comunicarse entre sí, también diseñamos GRCBox, que es una unidad integrada de bajo coste que permite la comunicación del Vehículo a Todo (V2X). A partir de nuestro estudio de aplicaciones para dispositivos móviles diseñados para redes vehiculares, descubrimos que el uso de teléfonos inteligentes proporciona una nueva dirección para la investigación relacionada con SIT y redes vehiculares al permitir la adopción rápida de las soluciones existentes, donde los usuarios pueden descargar y usar las aplicaciones con sólo un clic a un botón. Al mismo tiempo, la portabilidad y compacidad de los dispositivos los hace limitados en términos de velocidad, potencia de procesamiento y precisi[CA] Una de les àrees d'investigació que està rebent més atenció recentment és la de vehicles autònoms. Els investigadores estan en este moment centrats en el tercer dels cinc nivells d'autonomia, els quals són: assistència en la conducció, automatització parcial, automatització condicional, alta automatització i automatització completa. Malgrat els ràpids progressos que s'estan donant en este camp, l'adopció d'estes solucions portarà temps no sols degut a qüestions legals, sinó també pel fet que els avanços tecnològics s'enfronten a un lent recolzament per part dels fabricants. A més a més, la baixa taxa de renovació de vehicles de carretera, dificulta el desplegament de tecnologies innovadores com és el cas de la xarxa vehicular. Huit anys després de la introducció de la norma 802.11p per a la comunicació vehicular de l'Institut d'Enginyers Elèctrics i Electrònics (IEEE), els vehicles que s'utilitzen a diari encara manquen de la capacitat de comunicar-se entre sí. Este fet impedeix l'ús de les moltes aplicacions de seguretat del Sistema d'Intel·ligència de Transport (SIT) que aprofita la xarxa vehicular per a l'intercanvi de dades. La forma òbvia de tractar aquest problema és posar les tecnologies disponibles a la disposició dels usuaris comuns per a desenvolupar solucions que es puguen implementar fàcilment, còmodes d'adoptar i, a més a més, econòmiques. Per aquesta raó, traslladem la nostra atenció als dispositius intel·ligents, especialment als telèfons intel·ligents, els quals han recorregut un llarg camí des de la primera introducció de telèfons mòbils a finals del segle XX. Hui en dia quasi tots porten un en la butxaca on siga que vagen, permetent-los no sols fer cridades, sinó també mesurar i controlar diferents paràmetres amb l'ajuda dels molts sensors integrats que estan disponibles per a estos dispositius compactes però potents. El nostre objectiu és estudiar els efectes de la integració dels telèfons intel·ligents a la xarxa vehicular per a desenvolupar aplicacions de seguretat del SIT. L'elecció dels telèfons intel·ligents ací no està sols justificada per la seua àmplia disponibilitat i ús, sinó també perquè estan evolucionant cap a terminals d'alt rendiment amb microprocessadors de múltiples nuclis dotats amb un grup suficientment divers de sensors. En esta tesi proposem tres diferents aplicacions de seguretat SIT per a telèfons intel·ligents, dissenyats per a aprofitar l'entorn de xarxa vehicular: una aplicació de generació d'advertència anomenada Messiah que alerta els conductors de la presència de vehicles d'emergència en les proximitats; una aplicació Advertència de Col·lisió Frontal (ACF) que adverteix els conductors si no mantenen la distància de seguretat mínima entre el vehicle que va davant i el que el segueix; i, per últim, una aplicació que té com objectiu ajudar els conductors amb assistència visual durant l'avançament, anomenat EYES. Totes aquestes aplicacions han sigut desenvolupades per a la plataforma Android, i depenen de la transmissió de dades entre vehicles. Donat que els vehicles que utilitzem a diari no admeten la possibilitat de comunicar-se entre sí, també dissenyem GRCBox, que és una unitat integrada de baix cost que permet la comunicació de Vechicle a Tot (V2X). A partir del nostre estudi d'aplicacions per a dispositius mòbils dissenyats per a xarxes vehiculars, descobrim que l'ús de telèfons intel·ligents proporciona una nova direcció per a la investigació relacionada amb SIT i xarxes vehiculars al permetre l'adopció ràpida de les solucions existents, on els usuaris poden descarregar i utilitzar les aplicacions amb un sol clic a un botó. Però al mateix temps, la portabilitat i la compacitat dels dispositius els fa limitats en termes de velocitat, potència de processament i precisió del sensor integrat, cosa que afecta al rendiment de les aplicacions.[EN] One of the research areas that is receiving a lot of attention recently is autonomous vehicles. Researchers are currently focused on the third level of autonomy out of the five levels, which are: drive assistance, partial automation, conditional automation, high automation, and full automation. Even though rapid progress is being made in this field, the adoption of these solutions will take time not only due to legal issues, but also due to the fact that technological improvements face slow endorsement by manufacturers. Also, the slow renewal rate of vehicles on road hinders the deployment of novel technologies, as is the case of Vehicular Networks (VNs). Eight years after the introduction of the IEEE 802.11p standard for vehicular communication, vehicles used on a daily basis still lack the capability of communicating with one other. This fact impedes the use of the many ITS safety applications that take advantage of VNs for data exchange. The obvious way to handle this problem is to use the available technologies at the disposal of common users to develop solutions that are easily deployable, effortless to adopt, and moreover, cost effective. For this reason we shift our attention to smart devices, specially smartphones, which have come a long way since the first introduction of mobile phones in the late 20th century. Nowadays, nearly everyone carries one in their pocket anywhere they go, allowing them to not only make calls, but also to measure and monitor different parameters with the help of the many on-board sensors that are available to these compact yet powerful devices. Our objective is to study the effects of integrating smartphones to vehicular networks, to develop ITS safety applications. The choice of smartphones here is not only justified by their wide availability and use, but also because they are evolving towards high performance terminals with multi-core microprocessors packed with a sufficiently diverse group of sensors. In this thesis we propose three different ITS safety applications for smartphones, designed to take advantage of the vehicular network environment: a warning generation application called Messiah that alerts drivers of the presence of emergency vehicles in close proximity; a FCW application which warns drivers if a minimum safe distance is not maintained between the vehicle ahead and the one following it; and lastly an application that aims to aid drivers with visual assistance while overtaking, named EYES. All these applications have been developed for the Android platform, and are dependent on the data transmission among vehicles. Since vehicles we use on a day to day basis still do not accommodate the possibility to communicate with one another, we also designed the GRCBox, which is a low cost on-board unit that supports V2X communication. From our study of applications for mobile devices designed for VNs, we found that the use of smartphones provides a new direction to research related to ITS and VNs by allowing a quick adoption of the existing solutions, where users are able to download and use applications just by one click of a button. But at the same time, the portability and compactness of the devices makes them limited in terms of speed, processing power, and accuracy of the on-board sensor, thus affecting the performance of the applications. In our case, the simpler Messiah application performed very well, while the EYES application that is dependent on GPS data, and the FCW application which required heavy processing and use of the camera due to its dependence on plate recognition, were affected by the hardware limitations of the smartphones.Patra, S. (2019). Development and evaluation of smartphone-based ITS applications for vehicular networks [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/124058TESI

Making Transport Safer: V2V-Based Automated Emergency Braking System

An important goal in the field of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) is to provide driving aids aimed at preventing accidents and reducing the number of traffic victims. The commonest traffic accidents in urban areas are due to sudden braking that demands a very fast response on the part of drivers. Attempts to solve this problem have motivated many ITS advances including the detection of the intention of surrounding cars using lasers, radars or cameras. However, this might not be enough to increase safety when there is a danger of collision. Vehicle to vehicle communications are needed to ensure that the other intentions of cars are also available. The article describes the development of a controller to perform an emergency stop via an electro-hydraulic braking system employed on dry asphalt. An original V2V communication scheme based on WiFi cards has been used for broadcasting positioning information to other vehicles. The reliability of the scheme has been theoretically analyzed to estimate its performance when the number of vehicles involved is much higher. This controller has been incorporated into the AUTOPIA program control for automatic cars. The system has been implemented in Citroën C3 Pluriel, and various tests were performed to evaluate its operation

SAI: safety application identifier algorithm at MAC layer for vehicular safety message dissemination over LTE VANET networks

Vehicular safety applications have much significance in preventing road accidents and fatalities. Among others, cellular networks have been under investigation for the procurement of these applications subject to stringent requirements for latency, transmission parameters, and successful delivery of messages. Earlier contributions have studied utilization of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) under single cell, Friis radio, or simplified higher layer. In this paper, we study the utilization of LTE under multicell and multipath fading environment and introduce the use of adaptive awareness range. Then, we propose an algorithm that uses the concept of quality of service (QoS) class identifiers (QCIs) along with dynamic adaptive awareness range. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of background traffic on the proposed algorithm. Finally, we utilize medium access control (MAC) layer elements in order to fulfill vehicular application requirements through extensive system-level simulations. The results show that, by using an awareness range of up to 250 m, the LTE system is capable of fulfilling the safety application requirements for up to 10 beacons/s with 150 vehicles in an area of 2 × 2 km2. The urban vehicular radio environment has a significant impact and decreases the probability for end-to-end delay to be ≤100 ms from 93%–97% to 76%–78% compared to the Friis radio environment. The proposed algorithm reduces the amount of vehicular application traffic from 21 Mbps to 13 Mbps, while improving the probability of end-to-end delay being ≤100 ms by 20%. Lastly, use of MAC layer control elements brings the processing of messages towards the edge of network increasing capacity of the system by about 50%

Video-assisted Overtaking System enabled by V2V Communications

V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) is a promising technology to diminish road hazards and increase driving safety. This thesis focuses in the transmission of video between vehicles (V2V, Vehicle-to-Vehicle) in an overtaking situation, helping drivers to be more aware and less error-prone in these situations. In the implementation, the vehicle reads from vehicle's CAN and GPS data to setup the system, streams his Line of Sight to the overtaking vehicle and uses DSRC as the communication technology

Providing over-the-horizon awareness to driver support systems

Vehicle-to-vehicle communications is a promising technique for driver support systems to increase traffic safety and efficiency. A proposed system is the Congestion Assistant [1], which aims at supporting drivers when approaching and driving in a traffic jam. Studies have shown great potential for the Congestion Assistant to reduce the impact of congestion, even at low penetration. However, these studies assumed complete and instantaneous availability of information regarding position and velocity of vehicles ahead. In this paper, we introduce a system where vehicles collaboratively build a so-called TrafficMap, providing over-the-horizon awareness. The idea is that this TrafficMap provides highly compressed information that is both essential and sufficient for the Congestion Assistant to operate. Moreover, this TrafficMap can be built in a distributed way, where only a limited subset of the vehicles have to alter it and/or forward it in the upstream direction. Initial simulation experiments show that our proposed system provides vehicles with a highly compressed view of the traffic ahead with only limited communication

On the needs and requirements arising from connected and automated driving

Future 5G systems have set a goal to support mission-critical Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications and they contribute to an important step towards connected and automated driving. To achieve this goal, the communication technologies should be designed based on a solid understanding of the new V2X applications and the related requirements and challenges. In this regard, we provide a description of the main V2X application categories and their representative use cases selected based on an analysis of the future needs of cooperative and automated driving. We also present a methodology on how to derive the network related requirements from the automotive specific requirements. The methodology can be used to analyze the key requirements of both existing and future V2X use cases

Integration of vehicular network and smartphones to provide real-time visual assistance during overtaking

[EN] The Intelligent Transportation Systems area has experienced great developments in the recent past, although suffering from slow adoption ratios thus depriving consumers of many interesting and innovative applications. The only solution to this problem is to develop Intelligent Transportation Systems solutions using the already available technologies that are within the grasp of the common people, to make them cost-effective, quick to deploy and easy to adopt. We have therefore developed an affordable Intelligent Transportation Systems that make use of standard smartphones to assist drivers when overtaking. The system autonomously creates a network among the close-by vehicles and provides drivers with a real-time video feed from the one located just ahead. Our system seamlessly offers a better view of the road, and of any vehicle travelling in the opposite direction, being especially useful when the front view of the driver is blocked by large vehicles. We have validated our overtaking assistance system, in both laboratory environment and realistic scenarios. The laboratory tests involved choosing the most effective video codec between MJPEG and H.264, for providing real-time video streaming. Then, using the chosen codec, we performed the outdoor tests to further tune our application to maximise performance. The preliminary results from our experiments allow being optimistic about the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed system.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was partially supported by the Special Research Fund – funding for joint doctorates of the Ghent University with scholarship code 01SF3316, and the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Programa Estatal de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad, Proyectos I+D+I 2014, Spain, under grant TEC2014-52690-R.Patra, S.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Cano, J.; Veelaert, P.; Philips, W. (2017). Integration of vehicular network and smartphones to provide real-time visual assistance during overtaking. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks (Online). 13(12):1-17. doi:10.1177/1550147717748114S117131

Assessment of VANET multi-hop routing over an experimental platform

International audienceEvaluation of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) over real environments is still a remaining issue for most researchers. There are some works which carry out performance tests to evaluate the communication channel according to physical and MAC conditions. Only a few works deal with multi-hop experimentation in this field, and practically none tests multi- hop protocols. In this paper an integral VANET testbed is evaluated, using 802.11b and a multi-hop network managed by the Optimized Link State Routing protocol (OLSR). Up to four vehicles are used to study the VANET performance over different traffic environments and different metrics are considered to analyse the results in terms of delay, bandwidth, packet loss and distance between nodes. Furthermore, a deeper analysis is carried out to track the routes followed by packets end to end. Since a routing protocol is used, results differ from traditional one-hop and static-route tests, presenting a more realistic study