Seamless Connectivity System for Intelligent Public Transportation Systems: Architecture and Mechanism Design

Providing ubiquitous connectivity to the passengers of public transportation vehicles is an important goal of the communication system designers in the context of fast development of the intelligent transportation systems and of the Future Internet communication technologies. This paper proposes the architecture of a connectivity system for public transportation communication services, the architecture design being considered on three distinct levels: system, functional and platform level. The proposed system architecture specifies a minimal set of entities required to implement the envisaged connectivity solution and based on a functional analysis the subsystems and modules are derived. By mapping the functional architecture on the hardware components intended to be used the platform architecture is developed. The paper proposes also the design of the mechanisms which implement the inter-process communications, perform the acquisition and handling of the context information and implement a distributed information system characterizing the heterogeneous networking environment. For other mechanisms, like decision and mobility management, the design principles are described. In order to validate the proposed architecture design and to check the correct functioning of the various subsystems and modules a few experimental tests are presented.