Dynamic Wi-Fi Reconfigurable FPGA Based Platform for Intelligent Traffic Systems

This chapter proposes a software and hardware platform based on a FPGA board to which a Wi-Fi communication device has been added in order to make remote wireless reconfiguration possible. This feature introduces a high level of flexibility allowing the development of applications which can quickly adapt to changes in environmental conditions and which can react to unexpected events with high speed. The capabilities introduced by wireless technology and reconfigurable systems are important in road traffic control systems, which are characterized by continuous parameter variation and unexpected event and incident occurrence. Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is the term commonly used to describe the employment of electronic devices for the management of road traffic and other types of transportation networks for improving decision making by operators and users. There are many new available technologies which can be used for increasing the efficiency of road systems and many cities are introducing ITS models as pilot schemes to test their effectiveness. Reconfigurable hardware offers many benefits and this led to its use in the ITS field also. Traffic light systems implemented on FPGAs were developed and examples can be found in the literature (El-Medany & Hussain, 2007; Zhenggang et al., 2009). This research led to the conclusion that FPGA based devices can be a good solution for this type of systems conferring them scalability, adaptability and stability, and increasing their efficiency (Zhenggang et al., 2009). FPGAs had also been used in vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V), the authors of (Sander et al., 2009) presenting a V2V communication system based on this technology and special mechanisms that exploit its benefits. The result consists of a modular and flexible framework for software routines which in the same time supports critical tasks with special hardware accelerators. The modularity achieved with the help of FPGA technology allows the system to react to changes in the environmental conditions or in the user demands.

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