Collaborating vehicles for increased traffic safety

Transportation has expanded the scope of human mobility, increasing the distances we cover on a regular basis. The large benefits of transportation have resulted in a huge recent increase in the number of vehicles. This, however, implies an increased number of traffic accidents that cause many fatalities and injuries every year. It also leads to problems like increased delay for commuters, and negative effects on the environment. Not to mention, the money spent in the wasted fuel, as well as the costs of fixing damaged equipment and property. To help in mitigating these problems the vehicles and the road infrastructure should be equipped with intelligent devices that allow them to communicate and collaborate with each other and exchange safety information concerning accidents, road traffic conditions, and weather conditions as well as non-safety information. Recently, this topic termed telematics has gathered considerable interest constituting a lot of work and research all included under the title of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). The thesis work defines general communication requirements of future telematics applications and investigates various wireless carriers that are important to achieve communication inbetween vehicles and between vehicles and nearby infrastructure. We analyse several future applications related to the ITS field and describe their communication requirements. Based on the communication requirements the applications are grouped into different profiles in order to determine the most suitable carrier for each profile. Disclaimer: This paper reflects only the authors’ views and the European Community (as cofounders of the CVIS, SAFESPOT and PReVENT Sixth Framework Programme projects, through the European Commission DG Information Society and Media) is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained within