Vehicle-to-vehicle and Road-side Sensor Communication for Enhanced Road Safety

We propose a hybrid ITS safety architecture that combines vehicle-to-vehicle communication and vehicle-to-roadside sensor communication. Opposed to dedicated roadside units, which require major investments for purchase, installation and maintenance, roadside wireless sensor and networking technology represents a cost-effective solution and can leverage the deployment of the system as a whole. Among the various services of the hybrid communication system, the paper introduces accident prevention and post-accident investigation. We present a system and protocol architecture with a fully distributed concept for efficient and secure storage of sensor data. For deployment, this architecture will likely be combined with an alternative approach using dedicated road-side units as a centralized network element for communication and data storage. For the proposed system, we describe the main components (radio, networking and services, security). Finally, we describe our prototype implementation and experimental testbed featuring hardware and software platforms for vehicle on-board units and sensor nodes.