Architecture of a Vehicle Communication Gateway for Media Independent Handover

Communication within and from a vehicle is a key function for various vehicle applications, like telematics, logistics, and traffic control applications. This paper describes the flexible and extendable architecture of a vehicle communication gateway which acts as a central communication device embedded in the vehicle and managing the in-vehicle, inter-vehicle, and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. The focus of this paper is the vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, since this link is continuously changing due to the mobility of the vehicle. To enable a seamless access to the infrastructure (e.g. internet) the gateway autonomously switches between to the “best” available communication system at the current time and location. The “best” available network is selected from a list of all possible networks according to a user policy. The policy considers the user preferences, operator contracts, Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of the used service, and security requirements. The architecture is defined that flexible that arbitrary communication system can be aggregated either as local communication (short range) system or wide area communication system (long range). A prototypical implementation of the vehicle communication gateway has been developed which uses GPRS, UMTS, and WLAN as wide area communication systems and Bluetooth, WLAN, Ethernet as local ones. The paper presents the architecture and the prototypical implementation of this gateway, which has been motivated by the European Union founded IST-MYCAREVENT project.