The implementation of ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) services offers great potential to improve the level of safety, efficiency and comfort on our roads. Although cooperative traffic safety applications rely heavily on the support for real-time communication, the Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism proposed for the upcoming IEEE 802.11p standard, intended for ITS applications, does not offer deterministic real-time support, that is, the access delay to the common radio channel is not upper bounded. To address this problem, we present a framework for a vehicle-to-infrastructure-based (V2I) communication solution extending IEEE 802.11p by introducing a collision-free MAC phase assigning each vehicle an individual priority based on its geographical position, its proximity to potential hazards and the overall road traffic density. Our solution is able to guarantee the timely treatment of safety-critical data, while minimizing the required length of this real-time MAC phase and freeing bandwidth for best-effort services (targeting improved driving comfort and traffic efficiency). Furthermore, we target fast connection setup, associating a passing vehicle to an RSU (Road Side Unit), and proactive handover between widely spaced RSUs. Our real-time MAC concept is evaluated analytically and by simulation based on a realistic task set from a V2I highway merge assistance scenario.

Cooperative traffic safety applications such as lane change or overtaking assistance have the potential to reduce the number of road fatalities. Many emerging traffic safety applications are based on IEEE 802.11p and periodic position messages, so-called cooperative awareness messages (CAM) being broadcasted by all vehicles. In Europe, ETSI defines a periodic report rate of 2 Hz for CAMs. Although a high report rate is the key to early hazard detection, the 2 Hz rate has been chosen to avoid congestion in settings where the vehicle density is high, e.g., on major highways and in urban scenarios. However, on rural roads with a limited number of communicating vehicles, a report rate of 2 Hz leads to unnecessary delay in cooperative awareness. By adapting the CAM report rate depending on the specific application and road traffic density, and by making use of the priority levels provided by the 802.11p quality of service mechanism, we show that hazards can be detected earlier and the available bandwidth is used more efficiently, while not overexploiting the network resources.

A platoon of trucks driving at the same, mutually agreed speed while keeping a minimum inter-vehicle distance will reduce fuel consumption, enhance transport efficiency as well as improve the safety of other adjacent road users. The European profile of IEEE 802.11p for inter-vehicle communications uses a single 10 MHz control channel dedicated to safety-critical data, shared by periodic status updates, CAM (Cooperative Awareness Message), and event-triggered warnings, DENM (Decentralized Environmental Notification Message). Coupled with the random access delay inherent to the 802.11p medium access method, the strict timing and reliability requirements of platoon applications are not easily met. To this end, we evaluate by simulation the effect of IEEE 802.11p-compliant send rate adaptations and message type prioritizations and the choice of warning dissemination strategy on CAM transmissions and DENM dissemination in a platooning scenario. Simulation studies of a platoon of 10-20 vehicles in a busy highway scenario show that the context-aware choice of send rate, priority class and dissemination strategy not only reduce the dissemination delay of DENMs but even has a significant effect on the throughput of CAMs exchanged by platoon members.

Recent advances in cooperative driving hold the potential to significantly improve safety, comfort and efficiency on our roads. An application of particular interest is platooning of trucks, where it has been shown that keeping a minimum inter-vehicle distance results in considerably reduced fuel consumptions. This, however, puts high requirements on timeliness and reliability of the underlying exchange of control messages between platoon members. The European profile of IEEE 802.11p, recently adopted by ETSI, defines two message types to this end, periodic beacons for basic cooperative awareness (CAM) and event-triggered decentralized environmental notification messages (DENM), both using the common control channel. The IEEE 802.11p employs a random medium access protocol, with excessive delays that may prevent proper functionality of a platooning application. To mitigate the effects of this, ETSI standardizes a decentralized congestion control algorithm to, e.g., lower the CAM frequency when needed. Some service channels with less strict requirements on send rates, data traffic types or medium access methods are available. In this paper we compare the performance of decentralized, standard-compliant inter-platoon communication using IEEE 802.11p on the control channel with a solution based on a service channel, which combines a random access phase for DENM with a centralized, scheduled access phase for CAM. A dedicated service channel for platooning applications enables us to always guarantee timely channel access of CAM packets before a specified deadline and our simulations show that this is achieved at very small sacrifices in DENM dissemination delay.

Future cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) applications aimed to improve safety, efficiency and comfort on our roads put high demands on the underlying wireless communication system. To gain better understanding of the limitations of the 5.9 GHz frequency band and the set of communication protocols for medium range vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication, a set of field trials with CALM M5 enabled prototypes has been conducted. This paper describes five different real vehicle traffic scenarios covering both urban and rural settings at varying vehicle speeds and under varying line-of-sight (LOS) conditions and discusses the connectivity (measured as Packet Reception Ratio) that could be achieved between the two test vehicles. Our measurements indicate a quite problematic LOS sensitivity that strongly influences the performance of V2V-based applications. We further discuss how the awareness of these context-based connectivity problems can be used to improve the design of possible future cooperative ITS safety applications.