A Proposal of Network Architecture for Narrowband V2X Communication

Recently Cooperative ITS has been researched and developed around the world. Cooperative ITS is an attempt to let vehicles utilize information gathered from the environment via V2X (V2V/V2I) in addition to those collected by the vehicle itself. In North America and Europe, the 5.9 GHz wireless communication band is planned for use, which can provide 7 or 8 channels. Meanwhile, the only frequency band available for ITS use in Japan is the 700 MHz band with a single channel. The authors must develop an ITS network architecture that can provide location transparency over narrowband V2X (V2V/V2I) communications, especially if Japan is interoperable with European and American countries in expanding its technologies. In this paper, to achieve location transparency in Japan with its narrowband V2V/V2I communications, the authors propose that high-speed mobile telecommunication technologies such as LTE is employed in combination with narrowband communications. Context-aware network controls that consider the data's size and latency tolerance, by setting priorities in accordance with vehicle circumstances can be employed to switch between the networks. Moreover, to achieve location transparency, the authors developed an application framework using stream processing technique with an optimization algorithm that places the features on physical nodes based on the given network architecture, bandwidth and computational resources.