In this paper, a low-cost radio-on-fiber (ROF) system for a 36 GHz band road-vehicle communication system (RVCS) is proposed and demonstrated. Optical components for 10 Gb/s baseband transmission systems, which are becoming lower in cost, are used for the proposed system. The signal is transmitted in the optical link in the form of an intermediate frequency (IF) signal of the 5.8 GHz band. The third subharmonic of a local oscillator wave (LO) is transmitted simultaneously with the IF signal from the central station to the remote stations (RSs). This scheme enables the realization of RSs without costly millimeter-wave synthesizers. In such a configuration, the influence of intermodulation distortion between the IF signal and the LO subharmonic and degradation of the carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) could possibly be a problem, and so an analysis and experiments were carried. It was clarified that the compression of dynamic range caused by the simultaneous transmission was small. Frequency tripling of the LO degraded the CNR of the LO; however, this effect was compensated for by increasing the optical modulation index (OMI) of the LO subharmonic. Increasing the OMI of the LO subharmonic proved to have no influence on the IM3 characteristics of the RF signal analytically and experimentally. The proposed low-cost system proved to have sufficient characteristics for millimeter-wave RVCS.

In this paper, we propose a new content delivery platform on the ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) road-vehicle communication system on the basis of ROF (Radio over Fiber). The platform is strongly motivated by the ROF communication system capabilities of (1) broadband access, (2) integrated multiple service transmission interface, and (3) simultaneous use of a single and downsized vehicle terminal shared among multiple services based on a multi-mode software radio system. Content is delivered on per reservation basis, as is carefully envisaged as a primary service which is subjected to immaturity of early ITS road-vehicle communication systems, and is provided in limited service areas such as parking on main highways. After the reservation, requested content is stored in a cache connected to a ROF local station via optical fiber. At the designated time, the content is delivered from the cache to a target terminal by way of the ROF local station at high-speed. It can also be done by moving the content from the cache to another cache depending on the target terminal location in a flexible and reliable manner, even if the target terminal could not reach the place at the time designated in the reservation. Such flexibility and reliability are required for consequent practical application, and are provided using information given in the reservations. We implement a preliminary system to evaluate the proposed platform from the viewpoints of (1) processing time from logging into the system for a reservation to delivering content to the target terminal and (2) amount of control traffic required for the delivery. The results show that the proposed platform in which content is delivered from a cache connected with a ROF local station distributed geographically is effective. We also evaluate content delivery throughput using the system connected with an actual ROF local station, and show that the effective throughput is 40 Mbps and the proposed platform is a promising ITS service platform. The paper concludes by discussing future study toward realizing a more promising and practical system.

We developed Millimeter-wave high speed spot communication system using radio-over-fiber technology for ITS telecommunication use. This system has wide bandwidth and provides a high-capacity channel between the base station and parked vehicles. The installation conditions (height, elevation angle) of the base station antenna of this system that enabled the largest possible communication area were obtained by simulation. In addition, we measured propagation and transmission characteristics. The width of the error-free service area was 8 m, which enables three vehicles to be served in one service area.

We have experimentally measured the propagation characteristics of 60-GHz-band millimeter wave between two vehicles to design of inter-vehicle communication (IVC) system in intelligent transport systems (ITS). Received power and bit error rates of 1-Mbps data transmission between a transmitter mounted on a leading vehicle and two receivers attached on a following vehicle were measured. A two-ray propagation model was devised to calculate the instantaneous propagation characteristics, and these estimations agree well with the measured characteristics. The feasibility of 1-Mbps data transmission between the running vehicles on an actual expressway was demonstrated. The cumulative distribution of received power between the two running vehicles when their height from the road surface fluctuated was also determined from the proposed two-ray propagation model and experimental measurements.