The application of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) transmits data with road-to-vehicle communication (RVC) and inter-vehicle communication (IVC). Digital signature is essential to provide security for RVC and IVC. The public key certificate is used to verify that a public key belongs to an individual prover such as user or terminal. A certificate revocation list (CRL) is used for verifying validity of the public key certificate. A certificate authority (CA) publishes a CRL and distributes it to vehicles. CRL distribution traffic disturbs ITS application traffic because of sharing wireless channel between them. To distribute it on low bit rate will help to ease the disturbance. Although multiplex transmitting is effective in reliable communication, a duplication of received packets is waste of bandwidth as a consequence. This paper proposes a CRL distribution scheme based on random network coding which can reduce duplicate packets. The simulation results show that the number of duplicate packets of the proposed scheme is less than that of a simple error correction (EC)-based scheme and the proposed one can distribute CRL to more vehicles than EC-based ones.

In the development of inter-vehicle communication systems for a prevention of car crashes, it is important to know path loss characteristics at blind intersections in urban area. Thus field experiments and numerical simulations have been performed. By the way, transparent waves from building walls are not considered in many cases. The reason why is that it is the worst case in terms of the path loss at blind intersection surrounded by buildings in urban area. However, it would be important to know the effect of transparent wave on the path loss in actual environments. On the other hand, path loss models have been proposed to estimate easily the path loss in urban environment. In these models, the effect of transparent wave is not clear. In this paper, the effect of transparent wave from building walls on path loss characteristics at blind intersection in urban area is investigated by using the FDTD method. Additionally, the relationship between transparent wave and path loss models is also investigated.

In the development of inter-vehicle communication systems for the prevention of car crashes, it is important to know radio propagation characteristics at blind intersections. In field experiments and numerical simulations to investigate radio propagation characteristics, a half wavelength dipole antenna is assumed to be the wave source in many cases. However, a directivity of car antenna is changed by the effect of both car body and antenna position on car. In this paper, path loss characteristics considering antenna positions on car body at a blind intersection in urban area for inter-vehicle communications using 700MHz band are investigated. Additionally, simplified car models are proposed for the efficient analysis of radio propagation. Here, the hybrid method using both FDTD and ray-tracing methods is used for the radio propagation analysis.

Currently, IEEE802.11p and ARIB STD T-109 are available as the typical inter-vehicle communication (IVC) standards. Carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are used in these standards. However, the performance degrades when there are hidden terminals. In this paper, IVC system that using a direct sequence spread spectrum (DS/SS) modulation scheme is discussed because it has code division multiple access (CDMA) capability. In DS/SS-IVC scheme, it is possible to avoid hidden terminal problem. On the other hand, near-far problem (NFP), multiple access interference (MAI) and interference by equivalent pseudo noise (PN) codes occurs in DS/SS communication. These problems cause performance degradation. In this paper, interference cancellation scheme and slotted ALOHA scheme with code sensing are applied so as to mitigate the impact of MAI, NFP and interference by equivalent PN code. By applying interference cancellation scheme and slotted ALOHA scheme with code sensing, the performance of DS/SS-IVC is improved. In this paper, location oriented PN code allocation is focused on as a method of PN code assignment. However, DS/SS-IVC scheme based on location oriented PN code allocation has a problem. Since each vehicle obtain PN code based on the position that is estimated by GPS, performance degrades when GPS positioning error occurs. Therefore, the positioning system of DS/SS-IVC scheme is also discussed in this paper. Elimination of ranging data that has large ranging error is proposed in addition to interference cancellation scheme and slotted ALOHA scheme with code sensing in order to improve the performance of positioning. From the simulation results, the positioning error can be mitigated by applying these proposed techniques.

An inter-vehicle communication system for the 720 MHz band that is designed to prevent car crashes at intersections has recently been proposed in Japan. This paper presents an analysis of the propagation characteristics of an intersection surrounded by concrete block walls in a residential area. The propagation characteristics were analyzed for the first time using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. We investigated the influence of wall thickness and source locations on the propagation characteristics. The results of our investigation showed that the most commonly used wall thickness and source locations do not strongly affect propagation loss. Furthermore, we analyzed the power delay profile and delay spread by taking into consideration the structure of the concrete block walls.

This paper presents a Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) propagation model for independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) channels in the mixture of none-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) and Line-of-Sight (LOS) environments. The derived model enables to evaluate the system statistical characteristics of Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR) for MIMO transmission based on Maximal Ratio Combing (MRC). An application example applying the model in 22 configuration to ITS Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) system is introduced. We clarify the effectiveness of the proposed model by comparisons of both computer simulations and measurement results of a field experiment. We also use the model to show the better performance of SNR when applying MIMO to IVC system than SISO and SIMO.

Inter-vehicle communication (IVC) system using 700 MHz band to prevent car crashes has been proposed recently. In this paper, we first apply the FDTD method to the analyses of propagation characteristics at an intersection for IVC. We investigate the propagation characteristics considering the electrical conductivities, thickness and windows of building wall and pedestrians. As a result, it is shown that the electrical conductivities and thickness of building wall have a slight influence. In contrast, windows and pedestrians have a great influence on the propagation characteristics. Furthermore, the azimuth delay profiles are obtained by using the MUSIC algorithm.

This paper studies the feasibility of 700 MHz band inter-vehicle communication system when it is put into practical use in urban area. To verify the system, a large-scale demonstration experiment in a quasi-street test course is performed. In the experiment, a number of vehicles which are equipped with communication devices conforming to ITS FORUM RC-006 specifications are employed. A simulation method that is applicable to large-scale communication model is also designed, and the validity of the method is verified by utilizing the results derived from the experiment. Based on this model, the quality of the inter-vehicle communication system in urban area communication environment is estimated. The results show that the system's performance satisfies the requirements of representative prevention scenes of traffic accident, and the feasibility of the 700 MHz band inter-vehicle communication system specified in RC-006 is verified in the practical use in urban communication environment.

A novel timing synchronizing scheme is proposed for use in inter-vehicle communication (IVC) with an autonomous distributed intelligent transport system (ITS). The scheme determines the timing of packet signal transmission in the IVC network and employs the guard interval (GI) timing in the orthogonal frequency divisional multiplexing (OFDM) signal currently used for terrestrial broadcasts in the Japanese digital television system (ISDB-T). This signal is used because it is expected that the automotive market will demand the capability for cars to receive terrestrial digital TV broadcasts in the near future. The use of broadcasts by automobiles presupposes that the on-board receivers are capable of accurately detecting the GI timing data in an extremely low carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) condition regardless of a severe multipath environment which will introduce broad scatter in signal arrival times. Therefore, we analyzed actual broadcast signals received in a moving vehicle in a field experiment and showed that the GI timing signal is detected with the desired accuracy even in the case of extremely low-CNR environments. Some considerations were also given about how to use these findings.

In this paper we analyze the characteristics of vehicle mobility and propose a novel Mobility Prediction Progressive Routing (MP2R) protocol for Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) that is based on cross-layer design. MP2R utilizes the additional gain provided by the directional antennas to improve link quality and connectivity; interference is reduced by the directional transmission. Each node learns its own position and speed and that of other nodes, and performs position prediction. (i) With the predicted progress and link quality, the forwarding decision of a packet is locally made, just before the packet is actually transmitted. In addition the load at the forwarder is considered in order to avoid congestion. (ii) The predicted geographic direction is used to control the beam of the directional antenna. The proposed MP2R protocol is especially suitable for forwarding burst traffic in highly mobile environments. Simulation results show that MP2R effectively reduces Packet Error Ratio (PER) compared with both topology-based routing (AODV [1], FSR [2]) and normal progressive routing (NADV [18]) in the IVC scenarios.

In conventional road-vehicle communication systems, user terminals in the vehicles have to directly connect to wireless access points (APs). However, vehicle speeds are so fast that the channel condition between the terminals and the APs constantly changes because of changing path loss and time-varying fading. In this paper, to compensate for such deterioration, we propose to reduce the relative speed between the terminals and the APs by an inter-vehicle packet relay technique. If a terminal can send data via other vehicles running at lower speeds, the relative speed will decrease, which suppresses the dynamic range of path loss and deterioration by fading. We, first, validate our method by a numerical analysis using a statistical path-loss model. The numerical analysis verifies that our method is able to suppress deterioration caused by path loss and time-varying fading. However, in the numerical analysis, geometric propagation of paths is not considered; instantaneous and rapid loss changes are not considered. Therefore, we evaluate our method by computer simulations using a geometric propagation model. In the simulations, phase difference between multiple paths and loss fluctuation within one frame duration affect the performance. From the results of the simulations, we validate our method. Furthermore, we investigate the combination of our method and the selection diversity technique, which can suppress channel fluctuation and may enhance the performance of our method. Moreover, we measure interference in the overlapped zone between two AP areas. From the measurement, we show that our packet relays do not cause a problem in interference between areas.

We investigated the radio propagation characteristics for line-of-sight (LOS) inter-vehicle communication (IVC) at 60 GHz on an actual road with an undulating surface. Radio propagation tests between two moving vehicles were carried out on a test course. From this, it was found that the measured received power on the actual road and the results calculated for a flat road approximately follow logarithmic normal distributions. To investigate this phenomenon in detail, a propagation test between two stationary vehicles on a road was performed. Furthermore, calculations using geometrical optics taking road undulation into consideration demonstrated that undulation in the road can cause variations in the received power that follow a logarithmic normal distribution. Finally, the received power for moving vehicles on an undulating road was calculated using the model.

In road-vehicle communication systems, the transmission rate between user terminals in the vehicle and the access points degrades due to changing path-loss and time-varying fading. In this paper, we used an inter-vehicle packet relay technique to improve channel quality in road-vehicle communication systems. We evaluated this method using numerical analysis to validate our method.

In this paper, we evaluate the effect of space-time coded cooperative relaying technique in multihop inter-vehicle communication (IVC) networks. The IVC systems have an issue that communication links are often blocked by obstacles such as heavy vehicles. The breakage of a radio link in multihop connections may significantly decrease the system throughput in multihop IVC networks. It is demonstrated through system-level evaluations that the cooperative relaying can offer remarkable capacity enhancement by exploiting multi-route diversity and overcoming accidental link breakage resulting from frequent topological changes.

To reduce the bandwidth needed for data transmission in an ad-hoc communication network, such as an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) inter-vehicle communication network, a broadcast scheme is proposed where the data to be transmitted is arranged into several classes. Each class contains more specific and detailed information. Since information to be transmitted often has a geographical relevance, the classes can be structured to represent this relationship. As data is routed through the ad-hoc network, the total amount of transmitted data is reduced by removing the data contained in one class on each hop. The class structure is adaptive so that in unforeseen situations the relative importance of transmitted data can be dynamically adjusted. Furthermore different manufacturers can implement different classes structures, and total length of data may be different. By computer simulation it was shown that in the proposed system the required bandwidth for transmission to achieve similar data reception rates to conventional non-structured data schemes can be reduced to less than one third, resulting in a more efficient transmission scheme. In addition a packet structure similar to IP packets is proposed which will enable easily integration of multimedia transmissions into vehicle to vehicle communications.

This paper discusses encoding of vehicular position information using predictive algorithms in inter-vehicle communications (IVC) from the viewpoints of source coding and noisy channels. Two vehicular driving models are assumed; one is the 15-mode as a suburban rapid transit driving pattern, the other is called calming mode as a street-driving pattern. Three types of schemes are compared; a pulse code modulation (PCM) scheme, a predictive coding (PC) scheme, and the variable interval prediction (VIP) scheme that is proposed here. This paper assumes that precise position information is got from a positioning system, and that all the transmitters and receivers have common predictors. Performance comparisons of the three types of schemes are carried out both of noiseless and noisy channels. Results show that the VIP scheme is superior to any other scheme.

Intelligent transport systems (ITS) are promising systems to give excellent solutions for many problems that we face in transport today. Not only road-to-vehicle communications but also inter-vehicle communications in ITS are expected to become popular in the future. On the other hand, an intra-vehicle communication network should be supported by multimedia information according to the explosive expansion of the Internet use and the like. An inexpensive transmission medium and transceiver becomes indispensable in such in-vehicle local area network (LAN) for multimedia information as these must handle full-motion video signals, without any electromagnetic interference. We have proposed on-board network architecture based on optical P1394b to realize effective inter-vehicle communications and enable all equipment which freely add and remove to the intra-vehicle network. And according to the proposed architecture, we have developed a 500-Mbit/s low-cost optical transceiver for the intra- and inter-vehicle communication network using a commercially available plastic clad fiber. An LD for the compact disk drive and a large area photodiode were adopted as low-cost and high-speed optical devices, and a logic direct driving type simple circuit having temperature compensation function was developed. Simple assembly technologies such as plastic molding and optical element press-fitting were also developed for mounting to reduce assembly cost. The total cost of the fabricated optical transceiver can be reduced less than 2/3, comparing with that of conventional one. We have performed transmission experiments and vibration tests using our optical transceivers that are mounted in on-board elements and connected to the on-board network, and have confirmed these stable operations. Experimental results show our proposed architecture and fabricated optical transceiver can play a key role in the intra- and inter-vehicle communication network.

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.

This paper proposes an autonomous relay access algorithm that provides an intelligent wireless network structure for inter-vehicle communication systems. The proposed algorithm introduces a special classification among mobile terminals and assigns terminals to one of several terminal groups, which are adaptively and autonomously constructed according to traffic conditions. The proposed algorithm uses the terminal groups to conduct relay access transmission among terminals, and achieves a high rate of successful inter-terminal transmission. Computer simulation confirms that the proposed algorithm can achieve a lower blocking probability than that without a relay access scheme.

In inter-vehicle communication (IVC) expectation for spread spectrum techniques is high. However, in a decentralized network environment, power control is difficult and until now perfect power control has been assumed. In this paper the use of sector antennas are proposed as a solution to the problems of power control in inter-vehicle communication. Results are shown for an IVC protocol in both no power control and imperfect power control environments in a realistic fading channel. Omni-directional, uniform sector antennas and non-uniform sector antennas are examined by computer simulation. Non-uniform sector antennas are shown to be the best solution and to have high packet reception rates even for no power control environments.