Vehicular Ad-hoc Network as a Kind of Cyber Physical System

Just recently, I noticed the term of Cyber-Physical-System, which matches well my understanding of VANET as a functional network.

The study of VANET distinguishes itself from the research of other communication systems by the fact that the vehicular communication serves as the means of realizing a physical function system, e.g. danger warning for vehicle drivers and cooperative driving. In such a system, each vehicle is an information source as well as an information sink that is organized into a system towards a target function. In this kind of systems, the communication is more closely coupled with the functionality and has a pattern differing from other traditional communication systems, e.g. MANET, where reliably and timely information delivery is the only target of the whole network. An example of the coupling between the communication and functionality in VANET is the wireless danger warning, where the value of information and the requirements of the communication performance vary from one vehicle to other depending on the position and status of the vehicle. Besides, in VANET the information is also processed during its propagation among vehicles. Communication patterns in VANET have to match its purpose too. A notable example of this is the GeoCast communication combining the broadcast and the vehicle position.

Therefore, instead of the highly abstracted metrics like throughput and delay, more interesting topic of VANET would be the information flow pattern for particular function (service), and for this information flow there must be a communication complexity region behind it.

Coming back to the topic of Cyber-physical-system, it's a interesting and promising area due to the evolution of wireless communications, sensor technology, embedded system, and network computing. There are definitely something interesting we can do ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber-physical_system

Large field test of VANET from academic research project in Portugal

here are the interesting research with field test benches developed in Instituto de Telecomunicações:

http://www.av.it.pt/a.cardote/media/

More interestingly, the researchers have planed a large scale field trial of IEEE 802.11p based VANET involving 400+ taxis in Porto ;-) For more details, please their speech on RTCM 2011.

RTCM_1_Jul_11_s4p2.pdf

So long and thanks for all the Macs ...

NHTSA: The Safety Pilot planned in Ann Arbor, Mich. staring from Aug. 2012

According to an article from Wired, a field trial involving 3000 vehicles equipped with V2V communication system is planned in Aug. 2012. The trial will take about one year in Ann Arbor, Mich. to collect sufficient data for V2V standardization and to evaluate the safety applications using V2V wireless technologies.

The original article is available at Feds To Begin Testing Connected Vehicles.

US ITS-JPO selected four firms to provide roadside equipments for the Connected Vehicle Safety Pilot Program

Those four are

* Kapsch
* ITRI International, Inc
* Cohda Wireless and Cisco Systems Inc.
* Savari Networks

The original news came from: http://www.its.dot.gov/procurements/roadside_safetypilot.htm

From the news last Oct. there are 8 firms participated the test of DSRC equipments organized by US DOT: http://www.its.dot.gov/press/2010/hia_device_award.htm

* AutoTalks Ltd
* Cohda Wireless
* Cohda Wireless/TomTom
* Denso International America, Inc.
* DGE Inc.
* Industrial Technology Research Institute
* Savari
* Siemens Government Solutions.

This list could serve as a good reference but not complete supplier list of DSRC/802.11p equipments.

Embedded and Vehicular Communications

Since some time, I've being working on a OMAP based embedded system for a vehicular communication related project. It's really exciting to see how ARM based processors are capable for various tasks, e.g. mobile computing, connectivity, and even supercomputer... See the news about how did Canonical build a super computer out of OMAP4 based pandaboards.


At the moment, I just have the feeling the power efficient embedded SoC chips will be one of the fundamental building blocks dealing connectivity and computing in the Intelligent/Electricity cars...

Followups of GCDC

With the Team AnnieWay from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Winning the first Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC), Jongh's open source 802.11p Linux driver and the FAST protocol stack were proven to be working in at least the scenarios of GCDC.

There is a article (in Dutch) on the GCDC from university Twente worth to read.

More readings:
- Vehicle to Vehicle Communication Basis for Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge
- Can Cars Talk with Each Other?

Cohda is Active in Car2X World

Trials are planned in South Australia, according to the press release from AAP. This news shows also the involvement of Cohda, the supplier for German field trial project SIM-TD and the potential supplier for the U.S. IntelliDrive project, will be active in the Australian trials of C2X technologies.

Further readings:
- Smart cars trialled in national first
- Connect Safe Project in Australia
- DSRC Interoperability Study
- NXP and Cohda teach cars to communicate with 802.11p, hopes to commercialize tech by 2014

IEEE 802.11p (WAVE) gains public attention on its sucurity issue

Is it be easy to hack a car? Will it be easier to hack a highway with IEEE 802.11p?

Reported by COMPUTERWORLD, the emerging IEEE 802.11p technology could become the weak point for the highway safety and toll collection system that working on top of it. Rob Havelt, director of penetration testing at security vendor Trustwave's SpiderLabs, pointed out the threats faced by the emerging Car2Car communication technologies in his briefings at Black Hat DC.

This is not the first time that the security issues of Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) or system alike are discussed. Actually, along with the academia research on Car2Car communication, security has been always studied, e.g. SEVECOM project. However, a perfect security solution for Car2Car is very hard to achieve, if it really exists.

Particularly interesting, the experts of the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC) have developed the Linux driver module that can easily turn the COTS WiFi radio into IEEE 802.11p complying ITS transceiver on 5.9 GHz ITS band.

IEEE 802.11p is turning cars into trains

It could be true that when you are "driving" on the highway and reading the newspaper at the same time. See how Volvo and her partners are turning cars into an autonomously formed train on the highway.


The first demonstration from the EU Framework 7 project SARTRE. (Curtsy to Newscientist )

Man can guess what are driving behind the car-train are wireless radios, sensors and positioning sensors. By putting the chaotic traffic into neatly organized platoons, the technologies are saving energy and protecting us.

It's quite interesting to see the well ordered traffic bring efficiency. Think about the chaotic wireless data packets exchanged among the vehicles. There must be better ways to coordinate the "traffic over the air" than the RANDOM IEEE 802.11p, or?

About the SARTRE project: http://www.sartre-project.eu/en/Sidor/default.aspx