An 802.11p Compliant System Prototype Supporting Road Safety and Traffic Management Applications

During the last decades Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have been attracting the interest of an increasing number of researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs, as well as citizens and civil authorities, since they can contribute towards improving road transport safety and efficiency and ameliorate environmental conditions and life quality. Emerging technologies yield miniaturized sensing, processing and communication devices that enable a high degree of integration and open the way for a large number of smart applications that can exploit automated fusion of information and enable efficient decisions by collecting, processing and communicating a large number of data in real-time. The cornerstone of these applications is the realization of an opportunistic wireless communication system between vehicles as well as between vehicles and infrastructure over which the right piece of information reaches the right location on time. In this paper, the authors present the design and implementation of representative safety and traffic management applications. Specifically the authors discuss the hardware and software requirements presenting a use case based on the NEC Linkbird-MX platform, which supports IEEE 802.11p based communications. The authors show how the functionality of IEEE 802.11p can be exploited to build efficient road safety and traffic management applications over mobile opportunistic systems and discuss practical implementation issues.