Inter-Vehicle Communications to Save Lives

Emerging wireless technologies for vehicle-to-vehicle communication promise to dramatically reduce fatal roadway accidents by providing early warnings to motorists. As well as improving road safety, such technologies will also
help optimise traffic flow and enable drivers to take greater control of their vehicles.

Developed under the CarTALK 2000 project, the idea is for information sensed from the vehicle’s environment and information about manoeuvres to be transmitted from one Smart car to other Smart car in the vicinity. This allows early reactions like braking if some vehicles in front have had to use emergency braking, and so helps prevent rear-end collisions.

The data exchange between vehicles is made possible by ad-hoc networks.
These short-distance connections are spontaneously created between the vehicles as the need arises and can organise themselves without the help of any external infrastructure.

Other scenarios where such technology might be useful are if a vehicle encounters a critical situation such as congestion, fog, ice or an accident. It can pass the relevant information on to all affected road users in the immediate vicinity of the danger spot.
Traffic approaching from further away is given ample warning and can respond to the situation.
CarTALK 2000 actively addressed market introduction strategies performing cost benefit analyses and addressing legal aspects.

Security on the Road
A prerequisite for the successful deployment of vehicular communications is to make the systems secure. For example, it is essential to make sure that critical information cannot be modified by a hacker, and to protect the privacy of the drivers and passengers.The specific operational environment (moving vehicles, sporadic connectivity, etc.) makes the problem very novel and challenging.
The SEVECOM project addresses security of the future vehicle commmunication networks, including both the security and privacy of inter-vehicular communication and of the vehicle-infrastructure communication. It has set out to
define the security architecture of such networks, as well as to propose a roadmap for integration of security functions in these networks.
With the goal of enhancing the immunity of future road safety applications against a wide range of security threats, SEVECOM focuses on communications specific to road traffic.Three major aspects are being examined:

Threats, such as bogus information, denial of service or identity cheating.

• Requirements, like authentication, availability, and privacy.
• Operational properties, including network scale, privacy, cost and trust.

A European Market for Vehicle Telematics
For co-operative systems to reach their true potential we need an environment in which innovative telematics services can be developed and delivered cost-effectively, and hence become more attractive for both manufacturers and consumers.The best way to ensure this is to create an open and standardised end-to-end architecture for automotive telematics services.
GST, Global System for Telematics, is a major initiative mobilising more than 50 key stakeholders in the European
telematics industry. It will provide the building blocks to carry out the transition from closed to open systems, which is
seen as the key to bringing telematics functionality to all new vehicles and unlocking the market for online services.
With an open environment the range of services that will become available to manufacturers and consumers will increase.

We will Publish the next Smart Car Article soon,  Read Smart Car 7