Efficient Usage of Wireless Communication Resources for Safety and non-Safety Vehicular Communication

Establishing vehicular communication by adding information and communication technologies to vehicles and road infrastructures is a promising approach to improve safety and non-safety related communication for future traffic telematics applications. The objective of the Junior Research Group on Traffic Telematics is to analyze vehicular communication conditions and develop collaborative communication policies between vehicles and with communication infrastructures to provide an efficient and fair usage of the vehicular wireless communication resources. We first address safety-related communication and propose policies to efficiently share the available channel bandwidth between collaborative WLAN-based communicating vehicles. Our objective is to analyze the conditions creating channel congestions and to provide counter-measures avoiding them. We then also investigate non-safety related communication for which we assume the availability of various alternate communication technologies. We develop an abstract representation of such heterogeneous communication network as a weighted directed graph, where link metrics, such as communication performance or cost, are represented as the graph edges’ weights. Such representation would then let traffic applications select or use in a complementary way the best suited communication technologies. Although less life-critical than safety-related applications, traffic telematics applications based on non-safety related communications, such as distributed traffic density estimation and dynamic traffic re-routing, are nonetheless important as they are expected to ease the market introduction of vehicular communication for traffic telematics. They are also based on a larger scale, both spatially and in the number of actors, and therefore potentially require high computational resources. We therefore finally propose a simulation approach inspired from cloud computing to ease large scale simulation of vehicular communications for future traffic telematics applications. ⋆ The Junior Research Group is associated to the Decentralized Systems and Network Services (DSN) Research Group at the Institute of Telematics.