Infrastructures in Vehicular Communications: Status, Challenges and Perspectives

Vehicular communication is regarded as a backbone for the development of intelligent transportation system (ITS). Recently vehicular communication has attracted researchers from both academia and industry all over the world, notably, in the United States of America, Japan and European Union. The rapid advances in wireless technologies provide opportunities to utilize them in vehicular communication in advanced road safety applications. The most important feature of vehicular communication is to improve the road traffic safety, efficiency, comfort and quality of everyday road travel. Networking in particular and communication in general are important rudiments in the development of ITS. Generally, in vehicular communication, the information exchange occurs among vehicles not only in an ad-hoc based vehicle-to-vehicle networking but also in a vehicle-to-infrastructure with possible intermediate infrastructure-to-infrastructure networking. Therefore, the infrastructure plays major role in order to realize the full potential of vehicular communications. This chapter provides an in-depth survey of the infrastructures and technologies that are recently proposed as part of future ITS developments as well as tested for vehicular communications in mobile environment. Specifically, we provide an in-depth analysis of wireless technology-applications such as ad-hoc networking and wireless local area network (WLAN), dedicated short-range communication (DSRC), cellular technology and NOTICE Architecture, and compare their characteristics in terms of their abilities to support vehicular communications for development of ITS.