Exploiting trunked radio to support ITS network expansion and redundancy

Energy-efficient cooperative transmission for intelligent transportation systems

This paper presents a framework to model and analyze the survivability and vulnerability of intelligent transportation system (ITS) networks. The proposed framework includes qualitative and quantitative approaches and can be implemented during the planning and design phase of new ITS projects or assess the survivability and vulnerability of existing ITS networks. The qualitative approach is based on Survivable System Analysis (SSA). It identifies threat mitigation strategies for each threat identified and provides suggestions for improved security and survivability. The paper also presents a quantitative survivable system analysis approach that is aimed to compute the essentiality of ITS network components and rank-order these essentialities to determine the most essential components of the network. The proposed framework provides a significant addition to the current design practices by integration system security, vulnerability, and survivability into the design, operation, and management of ITS networks. While the case-study presented in the paper focused on ITS networks, the proposed framework can be applied to any other critical infrastructure distribution, control, and monitoring networks.

Recent catastrophic bridge failures clearly indicate the urgent need for improving interval-based bridge inspection procedures that are qualitative and subjective in nature. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) can mitigate the deficiencies of interval-based inspection techniques and provide real-time diagnostic information regarding the bridge structural health. SHM is not flawless however; the variability in the vehicle characteristics and traffic operational conditions makes it prone to false diagnosis. Recent advancements in the integration of SHM with intelligent transportation systems (ITS) demonstrate the successful use of ITS devices (e.g., traffic cameras, traffic detectors) in the analysis of bridge responses to multimodal traffic with varying loads or during the critical events that cause excess vibration beyond the normal limit. In an ITS-informed SHM system, the ITS device collected data can be integrated with SHM to increase the reliability and accuracy of the SHM system. This integration would reduce the possibility of false diagnosis of damages detected by the SHM system (e.g., vibrations caused by heavy vehicles on a bridge could be read by a SHM sensor as a structural health problem of the bridge), which would eventually decrease the bridge maintenance costs. Similarly, in SHM-informed ITS system, SHM sensors can provide data on bridge health condition for ITS applications, where ITS uses this bridge health condition information for real-time traffic management. In this paper, literature related to both ITS-informed SHM and SHM-informed ITS is reviewed. Based on the literature review, potential challenges and future research directions associated with ITS-SHM integration are also discussed.

The vanguard of the baby boom generation is approaching retirement age. They received their driver's licenses at the age of 16 at a time when freeways were reshaping urban land patterns. For those living in suburbs and the urban edge, freeway driving is a way of life. Nevertheless, as these drivers age, they too will experience changes in visual acuity and a reduction in their ability to respond quickly to changes in road conditions. Many studies document problems that older drivers face on city streets. The current study funded by the Arizona Department of Transportation and FHWA suggests that freeway driving might be less taxing for some. The study explores the possibility that intelligent transportation system (ITS) devices–-including variable message signs; portable, changeable message signs; and ramp meters–-may respond to older drivers’ challenges with freeway driving. Eleven focus groups held with diverse groups of freeway drivers from 65 to 80 years of age in 2003–2004 focused on these ITS devices and suggested minor changes in application that would enhance their value. Drivers said that fixed variable message signs with a positive contrast caught their attention and were easier to read than standard signs. They urged their use for short simple messages centered on the signs. Portable signs attracted attention, but they were subject to glare and were difficult to read at the roadside, particularly those with multiple phases. Ramp meters were enthusiastically endorsed especially when combined with acceleration lanes. A parallel study using Arizona accident data provided some statistical evidence to support positive views of ramp meters.

This paper proposes a system level study of an adaptive communication gateway for Intelligent Vehicles (IV) in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). This study starts with the analysis of the different communications standards that are expected to link the IV to mobile devices inside the vehicle, other IVs in the ITS network, the road side unites and the existing wireless infrastructures into three types namely, Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), Wide Area Network (WAN) and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). An adaptive communication gateway architecture is devised to support Multimode Multiband (MMMB) operation. This architecture accounts for the need for concurrent operation of multiple communication links and address the different challenges proper to the ITS applications

A novel block-chain based secure cross-domain interaction approach for intelligent transportation systems

A novel energy efficient IRS-relay network for ITS with Nakagami-m fading channels

The wireless mesh network (WMN) is an economical low-power solution to provide wireless broadband access in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). This paper investigates how to deploy access points (APs) to improve throughput and quality-of-service (QoS), when the multihop communication is used to extend the coverage of wireless ITS network. Frequency planning is suggested to improve the capacity with QoS provisioning and to make the system more scalable. To investigate the overall tradeoffs among QoS, throughput, and coverage, we develop an analytical model to evaluate throughput, frame delay, and jitter for the considered ITS WMN using the carrier-sense multiple-access (CSMA) medium access control (MAC) protocol. Then, we apply an optimization approach to determine the optimal separation distances between APs with the delay requirement. To provide a guideline for network planning, we compare the uniform-spacing and increasing-spacing AP deployment strategies. The uniform-spacing strategy is to make all the APs with the same separation distance. In the increasing-spacing strategy, the separation distances between APs are increased from the central AP to the outer APs. Because of the shorter separation distance, the AP closer to the central AP can deliver higher traffic. It is shown that the increasing-spacing strategy outperforms the uniform-spacing strategy in terms and a profit function, considering the capacity and the total cost for deploying APs.

Different wireless communication technologies, such as wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi), 4G cellular technologies and worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) have been used as alternatives or supplement to wired communication in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Widespread deployment of wireless technologies in ITS require a comprehensive understanding of their performance, limitations and advantages in different field conditions. The authors evaluated performance of Wi-Fi wireless communication between adjacent roadside ITS devices (i.e., nodes) in different field conditions with varying characteristics of Wi-Fi technology. Field tests revealed that modulation rates, transmission power, line of sight, distance between nodes play critical roles in the performance of Wi-Fi communication in different roadway conditions. To achieve a desired level of performance requirements between adjacent nodes, minimum network performance thresholds must be realized in the field. Transportation agencies can identify the achievable performance, such as saturated throughput, delivery ratio and received signal strength at a particular location, by following the field test procedure developed in this research. The evaluation strategies and results presented in this study will contribute to the future planning and design of Wi-Fi communication for a roadway wireless sensor or device network considering corresponding communication performance requirements for specific ITS applications.

Research efforts carried out on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for improving safety and efficiency of road transportation have been focused on cars, where vehicular communications have demonstrated to enhance the driver awareness with active services that improve fatality statistics. Although common vehicles accidents have been reduced in the last years, those involving vulnerable road users remain. Cyclists and motorcyclists cover a whole area where ITS and telematics should be embedded with no doubt, given the incremental popularity of bikes and motorbikes in urban mobility and short interurban routes. For this reason, this work takes the key objective of integrating two-wheelers within the future cooperative ITS network. Hence, a novel communication device especially adapted to cyclists and motorcyclists has been designed, by integrating vehicular wireless communications (i.e. IEEE 802.11p) and considering interface limitations. From the protocols perspective the work is focused on IPv6, and considers two-wheelers as part of the Future Internet. In fact, a great success of the proposal is exploiting the synergy between IETF (Internet) and ITS-specific protocols coming from ISO and ETSI, creating a novel active system to improve two-wheel transport safety through Cooperative Awareness Messaging (CAM) over IPv6. The embedded communication node for two-wheelers includes the proper software to warn the driver about the approaching of a regular vehicle through audio and visual notifications. Moreover, its counterpart for common cars has also been developed, but using an Android application running on a handheld device connected to a regular IPv6 in-vehicle network.

This article evaluates dynamic driver behaviour models that can be used, in the context of intelligent transport systems (ITS), to predict drivers’ compliance with traffic information. The inputs to this type of models comprise drivers’ individual socio-economic characteristics and other variables that may influence their compliance behaviour. The output is a binary integer representing whether drivers comply with travel advice or not. Two approaches are available for formulating this category of classification problems: discrete choice models and artificial neural networks (ANNs). The literature on this topic clearly points to the limitations of the discrete choice approach which suffers from assumptions of perfect information about travel conditions, infinite information processing capabilities of drivers and inability to model the uncertainty in driver decision making or the vagueness in information received from ITS devices. ANNs, on the other hand, are able to deal with complex non-linear relationships, are fault tolerant in producing acceptable results under imperfect inputs and are suitable for modelling reactive behaviour which is often described using rules, linking a perceived situation with appropriate action. This study aims to evaluate the performance of these two categories of models based on a common data set of driver behaviour, collected from a field behavioural survey on a congested commuting corridor in Brisbane, Australia. This article proposes the combination of fuzzy logic and neural networks as a viable approach for overcoming the limitations of existing algorithms by modelling drivers as heterogeneous individuals. The results showed superior performance for a neuro-fuzzy model over binary choice models in terms of classifying or predicting the categories of drivers most likely to comply (or not comply) with traffic advice. The accuracy of the proposed model, in terms of classification rate, ranged between 95 and 97% compared to 50–73% for the discrete choice models.

This thesis presents a work in progress related to the use of Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS) data to actuate an adaptive control system on an autonomous vehicle operating in an Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The autonomous passenger vehicle has rapidly matured from a speculative concept to a reality that is quickly appearing within our sightlines. Autonomous (also called self-driving, driverless, or robotic) vehicles have long been predicted in science fiction and discussed in popular science media. Recently, major corporations have announced plans to begin selling such vehicles in the near future, and some jurisdictions have passed legislation to allow such vehicles to operate legally on public roads. Autonomous vehicles will be performing intelligent functions (navigation, maneuver, behavior, or task) by perceiving the environment and implementing a responsive action based on HUMS input. Once these vehicles begin to operate on public roads as a norm, safety and reliability becomes a major factor. The implementation or expanded use of HUMS can perceivably render these systems reliable and safe to operate in any environment or mode. This thesis also depicts a notational framework for HUMS in autonomous vehicles operating on ITS networks and future research needed to make this a reality. Keywords: Health and Usage Monitoring System (HUMS), Reliability, Adaptive Systems, Prognostics, Autonomous Vehicle, Intelligent Transportation System

More than 10 years ago, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) began to standardize the communication between vehicles and infrastructure in so-called “Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS).” This communication is supposed to be self-organized, which means, it has to be operated without the assistance from an access network. However, since most of the communication components are deployed in an inhomogeneous manner by vehicle operators “in the wild,” the security aspects are—for the lack of a better word—challenging at least. We will examine the security of ITS networks by discussing different modes of possible attacks.

The intelligent transportation system (ITS) was supported by the sixth generation (6G) wireless networks, since it has great potential to realize intelligent transportation with the benefit for the society and economy. In order to overcome the practical problem of spectrum scarcity, ultra-low latency, large-scale connectivity in ITS, we propose a cooperative multiple-input single output non-orthogonal multiple access (MISO-NOMA) for ITS with intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) and simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). An user fairness optimization problem is formulated to maximize the fairness rate of the vehicles, subject to the quality of service requirements of the vehicles and the successive interference cancellation. The optimization problem involves the transmit beamformers design, the IRS reflection matrix design, and the power splitting ratio of the SWIPT, which lead to the problem is difficult to solve. For solving the challenging problem, an iterative successive convex approximation and semi-definite relaxation based algorithm is proposed. Explicitly, we firstly adopt the method of reconstructing epigraph for simplification due to the objective function is non-convex, and then the original problem is decomposed into two sub-problems that are easy to solve. Finally, Experimental results illustrate that the user fairness of the proposed cooperative MISO-NOMA for ITS with IRS and SWIPT is better than that of both the IRS-NOMA for ITS without SWIPT and the IRS-OMA for ITS.

The smartphone and mobile devices are gradually becoming the most widely distributed sensor nodes. The nodes communicate with others to form the mobile ad hoc network, which provides network infrastructure for context-awareness and supports mobile crowd sensing (MCS). In our view, MCS can be considered as an emerging paradigm for internet of things. The remote server is a collection of service applications. With the support of mobile cloud computing (MCC) services, devices based on sensors constitute a people-centric ubiquitous MCS for convenient collection of context-aware information. In this paper, we implement the conceptual MCS architecture with the support of MCC and the remote server system architecture with context-awareness. Then we analyses the infrastructure and features of MCS for context-awareness. A paradigm regarding intelligent transportation system (ITS) with cloud-assisted MCS support has been proposed to integrate and share resources of ITS and social network in a large degree through MCC and cloud of cloud. The rest of the paper reviews the possible attacks, security issues and challenges.