Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks with Image Recognition-Based Adaptive Array Antenna for Winter Road Surveillance in Local Areas

The rapid growth of the ITS (intelligent transport system) development requires us to realize new kinds of applications, such as the winter road surveillance system. However, it is still necessary to consider the network difficulty areas for LTE (long-term evolution) or 3G transmissions when one visits sightseeing spots such as ski resorts or spas in mountain areas. Therefore, this paper proposes a winter road surveillance system in the local area based on vehicular delay-tolerant networks. The adaptive array antenna controlled by image recognition with the Kalman filter algorithm is proposed as well to the system in order to realize higher delivery rates. The implementations of the prototype system are presented in this paper as well, and the effectivity of the radio transmission in the prototype system is realized by vehicular image recognition methods and the asynchronous voltage controls for antenna elements for the rapid directional controls of the radio transmission. The experimental results showed that the radio directional controls by the prototype system for the target vehicle can proceed within one second, and that the simulation with the GIS (geographic information system) map pointed out the delivery rates of the proposed method—which are better than those of the epidemic DTN (delay-tolerant networking) routing by the nondirectional antenna. The experiments of the proposed methods indicate a higher efficiency of the data transmissions—even in the mountain area. Furthermore, future research subjects are discussed in this paper.