An ITS-based Architecture for Opportunistic Networking

International audienceFor a smarter use of transportation systems, vehicles need to increase their environment awareness. This could be achieved by enabling vehicles to communicate with their environment. Once vehicles become connected, an ecosystem of applications and services could be developed around them, enabling the information exchange with other connected devices and contributing for a Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS). The environment of connected and cooperative vehicles is characterized by its heterogeneity, i.e., there are a wide variety of applications, a variety of users with different communication preferences. Moreover, countries may have specifics regulations. A single access technology to connect all these heterogeneity is impossible. For ubiquitous connectivity it is necessary to use existing wireless technologies (e.g., vehicular WiFi (ITS-G5, DSRC), urban WiFi, 802.15.4, and cellular). In such heterogeneous network environment, applications and services cannot take into account all technology particularities. It is necessary a communication architecture that hides the underlying differences of access networks from applications, providing seamless communication independently of the access technology. Based on the ITS architecture proposed by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), we propose a Decision Maker (DM) architecture that is capable to manage requirements and preferences from different actors (e.g., applications , users, administrators and regulators), it takes into account the short-term prevision about the network environment, it considers the context information (e.g., vehicle speed, battery level). And it also takes into account the route conditions between two communicating devices in order to make proactive decisions