V2X communications architecture for off-road autonomous vehicles

Driverless vehicles have received a great deal of attention in the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) research fields during the last decade. Moreover, with the release of several intelligent vehicles to the roads, the necessity of cooperation and coordination among the vehicles, infrastructure and road users is increasing. In order to implement these approaches, a proper communication architecture is required as the first step. Accordingly, this paper proposes the architecture for using three different categories of V2X communications schemes in off-road environments over multiple autonomous vehicles. The proposed schemes are inter-vehicle communication via Vehicle-To-Vehicle (V2V), bidirectional communication with pedestrians via Vehicle-To-Pedestrian (V2P) and Pedestrian-To-Vehicle (P2V), and bidirectional communication with infrastructure via Vehicle-To-Infrastructure (V2I) and Infrastructure-To-Vehicle (I2V). Over three different scenarios, numerous experiments were performed for each communication scheme. The outcome results prove the stability of the proposed schemes, in addition to their high performance over 4G connection, in terms of efficiency, in comparison to WiFi connection.