Trinity College Dublin

This work is a part of a three-year project funded by the Science Foundation Ireland Research Frontiers Program.

Motivation

Future cars will be equipped with short-range wireless inter-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communication devices based on commonly available wireless local area network technology, which provides best-effort communication guarantees. This technology can support non-safety-critical applications such as electronic tolling and emergency-vehicle arrival warning. It is also envisaged that safety-critical automotive applications ranging from adaptive cruise control to intersection collision avoidance will be developed based on coordination between communicating vehicles. These safety-critical applications will require reliable communication protocols that provide timeliness guarantees for message delivery. This project will investigate the development of such “real-time” wireless communication protocols targeted at automotive applications.

Scientific Basis

This project is investigating whether, and if so under what circumstances, it is possible to achieve hard real-time wireless vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication suitable for use in safety-critical cooperative automotive applications. In particular, the project is investigating the design of an integrated suite of protocols, including hard real-time medium access control and group communication protocols that provide predictable behaviour in the presence of varying link quality and node connectivity and that can coexist with the Wireless Access for the Vehicular Environment (WAVE) standards based on the emerging IEEE 802.11p specification.

Research Areas

• CarMAC, Medium Access Control for Real-time Communication in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks
• Vertigo, Vehicular Real-Time Group Communication