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Abstract
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According to United States Department of Transport (USDOT) statistics, roadway accidents are the leading cause of death for the age group 4-34 years with over 30,000 deaths a year. These roadway accidents also have a direct economic cost of over $ 200 billion. Day-to-day roadway traffic congestion is estimated to drain around 4.2 billion lost hours per year and the associated financial loss is estimated to be over $87 billion. The use of wireless technology to enable communications between all road user entities (generally termed V2X or Vehicle-to-Entity) so that they are aware of each other is seen as a promising approach to lessen the negative implications of road accidents and traffic congestion. USDOT IntelliDrive program is the official initiative to do exactly that.
The capability to estimate the position of a given entity with respect to another is a critical requirement in all V2X applications. Therefore, positioning and wireless communication capabilities can be considered the two critical building blocks of all V2X applications. Once all the technical challenges are addressed, V2X can be a paradigm changer and people will be able to rely on V2X technology to assist them in day-to-day driving to improve their safety, efficiency, and security. Eventually, the V2X-based awareness may be supplanted by various levels of vehicle control, ranging from crash avoidance to fully automated driving. For V2X application deployment to be feasible, all technologies that are a part of V2X have to be accurate, reliable and available in all drivable environments. GNSS being a key V2X enabler, this implies strict accuracy, reliability and availability requirements for GNSS-based positioning.
Crash Avoidance Metrics Partnership (CAMP), a consortium of automakers has been working on V2X technologies for a number of years as a collaborative effort with the USDOT support. Among the most recent research and development work done by this consortium is the Vehicle Safety Communications-Applications (VSC-A) project. As a part of this work, an interoperable Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications enabled fleet was built. More importantly, GNSS service availability and accuracy as applicable to V2X applications was investigated. The Position, Location, and Navigation (PLAN) Group of the University of Calgary conducted related extensive field trials in late 2009. This paper provides a summary of the goals and findings of this study and, more importantly, provides some insights on the positioning technology challenges ahead.
The study used a Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) link that was previously developed and tested as a part of CAMP-USDOT collaborative efforts for between vehicle communications. The method that will be selected for V2X relative positioning has a direct impact on the data volume shared Over-the-Air using the DSRC data link. Therefore, this study and its findings are of great importance for data management in Vehicular Networks.
Language: en |