Minnesota’s Tiger Project: Providing Reliable and Cost Effective Communication for ITS Deployment Within a Rural Corridor

The Minnesota Department of Transportation embarked upon the TIGER (Traveler Information Guidance and Emergency Routing) Project in the summer of 2003. The geographical scope of this project is the transportation corridor between the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area (pop. 2.9 million) and St. Cloud (pop. 90,000), which is located 60 miles northwest. The TIGER project is uniquely challenging in many ways. Not the least of which is the challenge of providing a reliable and cost-effective communication network to field devices with varying bandwidth requirements and in areas with limited existing infrastructure. This paper summarizes Mn/DOT�s approach, which employs a fiber optic backbone as well as high bandwidth and low bandwidth wireless communication. This paper provides an overview and lessons learned from the communication planning, design and deployment efforts to date.