New Approach to Enhance and Evaluate the Performance of VII and ITS Communication Systems

Principal Investigators

Dr. Nizar Al-Holou
University of Detroit Mercy

Project Dates:

01/01/2008 to 05/31/2010

Project year: Year 2

MIOH-UTC Project Identifier: TS 15; Project 1 and 2

Focus Area:

Research: Intelligent Transportation Systems

Abstract:

With the rapid advances in wireless communication and the introduction of DSRC as an enhanced protocol for Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) communications, promising opportunities for increased vehicle safety and an enhanced driving experience are available. With opportunities, however, come numerous technical challenges. In this project, we address the challenge of developing a test bed that allows for testing different inter-vehicle communication protocols and, yet, keeps the cost at a reasonable level. There are many difficulties involved in building such a test bed, including: the draft and continuously updated status of the proposed inter-vehicle communication protocols; the large number of nodes required to reflect a real world scenario on inter-vehicle communication; and the high cost of the available tools in this field. The proposed test bed provides a tool to investigate minimizing message delay, obtaining sufficient channel throughput, and evaluating real world inter-vehicle communication scenarios with actual vehicles.

Instead of simulating the communication channel and its ongoing communications, the test bed will deploy low-cost WiFi nodes to emulate multiple vehicles contending for the medium, and hence, the associated packet delay and channel throughput degradation. Different protocols can be used at the communicating end-devices; however, these protocols will only be used after the communication contention is resolved in its mirror WiFi-based network. The result is a versatile test bed with realistic measurements at a low cost that will be used to evaluate different wireless protocols.

This project is entering the second year of research in 2008-09.