Improved Traffic Safety by Wireless Vehicular Communication

In tomorrow's vehicle industry vehicles will have the ability to communicate and cooperate with each other in order to avoid collisions and provide useful information to each other. However, for this cooperation to be possible all vehicles will have to be equipped with compatible wireless 802.11p modules that implement the ITS-G5 standard. During the implementation phase of the system there will be plenty of older vehicles without such equipment. This thesis addresses this problem by developing the hardware and software for a road side unit called Drive ITS. It consists of a universal medium range radar that detects older vehicles, a 802.11p modem that forwards their position and speed vectors to newer vehicles and an embedded system that utilizes and integrates those two parts. The hardware for the embedded system is divided in two main parts; a microcontroller board and a single-board microcomputer. The software is written in two programming languages; C++ for the microcontroller and Java for the microcomputer. Tests have been performed by comparing Drive ITS results to results from other vehicles that already implement the ITS-G5 standard and it has been confirmed that the system works as it was intended to. This solution will prevent potential accidents of newer ITS-G5 vehicles with older ordinary vehicles thus saving human lives