In this work we introduce our efforts to implement a vehicular (V2X) communication system that is fully compliant with the requirements of the Scandinavian NordicWay project. In particular, we focus our efforts on the implementation of the project’s Traffic Signal Priority use case in which selected vehicles are able to send signal request messages (SRMs) to the traffic light controller in order to request priority for green light at specific intersections. We discuss the basic flow of the request/response messages, how messages are constructed according to the geographic data of the road infrastructure. Finally, we show how a vehicle sends messages using the Interchange, the key component of the NordicWay project, and its distinctive characteristic versus other state of the art vehicular communication frameworks.
The fifth generation (5G) new radio (NR) vehicle to everything (V2X) evolved as a key enabler in order to support advanced use cases for connected vehicles and automated driving applications with stringent reliability and latency requirements. One of the most significant parts of 5G NR V2X is the sidelink distributed resource allocation mode known as mode 2 in which vehicles do the resource allocation autonomously. This paper targets the third generation partnership (3GPP) 5G NR V2X mode 2 resource allocation enhancements, with a particular focus on inter user coordination between vehicles. Inter user coordination feature allows vehicles using the NR V2X mode 2 to exchange cooperation messages. Thus, acquiring additional information for resource allocation compared to the baseline fully distributed approach adopted in release 16, by overcoming the hidden node problem for instance. In this paper, we propose a practical inter user coordination framework for NR V2X mode 2 enhancement in different cast scenarios. Moreover, we show the gain achieved in packet reception ratio (PRR) by such framework using system level simulations.
Due to the fact of the increasing necessity and demands of the vehicle to everything communications (V2X), which includes vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications, new communication technologies need to be deployed and tested in real environments. Moreover, Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAM) and Decentralised Environmental Notification Messages (DENM) should be analysed and understood so as to determine which type of message should be sent when a specific alert has to be transmitted. In this paper, a communication schema with the ability to manage alerts generated in a Traffic Control Center, transforming them to the corresponding DENM messages and sending them to the requiered roadside unit (RSU) will be explained and tested in a real deployment scenario. In addition to this, to be able to easily test different scenarios of future real deployments a simulation of it will be explained that will help to create more specific scenarios and implement improvements without further cost or delay with the conclusion that the simulation tool needs more development to appropiately test V2X communications in real environments.
Heterogeneous multi-hop relaying deployment that involves both Uu and PC5 interface is potentially a promising technology to overcome the high propagation loss, blockage and mobility sensitivity in millimeter wave band communication for next-generation railway system. In this context, we analyze the radio resource management that targets different train applications under such deployment. Adopting the system deployment, channel and antenna configuration of 3GPP, we propose an approach that jointly optimizes radio resource management and routing topology for multi-hop relaying transmission involving both Uu and PC5 interface. The system level simulation results exhibit that the joint optimization outperforms the existing conventional algorithm. Simulations and analysis can also serve as feasibility analysis and guideline for a possible architecture in future train radio deployment.
Currently, internal communications in trains are based on wired networks to provide Ultra-reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) for control and monitoring systems. However, these wired infrastructures are expensive to implement and maintain. Wireless Consist Networks (WLCN) can be a solution to this problem. Particularly, 5th Generation (5G) networks are considered one of the best options to support URLLC. This paper analyzes the use of 5G technology for a Wireless Consist Network (WLCN), as a replacement for the current wired network inside train consists. The goal of this analysis is to calculate which 5G configurations are capable of supporting the worst case of the required train backbone traffic. Obtained results indicate that 5G is a potential technology for sensor and end devices communication in the WLCN.
Cybersecurity is an essential requirement to enable the deployment of Cooperative-Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS). In vehicular networks, Blockchain is a solution often considered to secure exchanges between nodes. In fact, this technology could enable each vehicle to check by itself the content of each message it receives, without the need to trust its neighbors. Nevertheless, Blockchain was initially designed for wired networks. Therefore, its deployment in vehicular networks would imply considering the features of this environment: high mobility, variable C-ITS applications’ requirements, limited vehicles capabilities, etc. That is why, in this paper, after comparing existing solutions, we introduce a new adaptive Blockchain framework, designed to address the vehicular environment challenges. We also describe a Blockchain architecture that could support this framework and present future directions that will contribute to its implementation and evaluation.
This paper develops some applications in which train-to-train (T2T) communications provide added value features to current railway communications systems, which are mainly based in train-to-ground (T2G) links. A campaign of measurements carried out in a Metro de Madrid depot is presented, where the feasibility of such systems is analyzed. The obtained results are both the jitter and delay in different situations. Besides, the broadcast of video over such link is tested.
This paper presents the design and operational implementation of a GNSS anti-spoofing system, and provides a first set results with real signals. The work discussed here is based on a validated proof of concept of a SCER (Secure Code Estimation and Replay) spoofing detector, and represents a first operational prototype towards the development of a global GNSS anti-spoofing network. Both the proof of concept and the prototype are based on Machine Learning (ML) techniques and novel signal features extraction. Its future usage in road transportation environments is discussed.
Automatic Train Operation (ATO) is a new growing market in the railways sector since 2019. Several railways operators such as SNCF, DB, SBB and so on have launched deep transformation in their infrastructures and rolling stock in order to enter in digital era. One of this game changers is upgrading to autonomous train on existing or new infrastructure. Since autonomous train means the absence of train driver, there is a big need of uplinked information to supervise autonomous trains from the ground. This includes the need of remotely driving the train if it encounters a problem, e.g. a non-recognised obstacle, an infrastructure breakdown. Remote driving will be a new operation mode in the railways sector that will rely on a well-designed radio link provided by 5G. This paper presents preliminary results on test tracks with Long Term Evolution (LTE) and a simulation based comparison between LTE and 5G at physical layer using Non orthogonal Multiple Access.
This article presents the results of experiments on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications between two Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) and a ground control station conducted in conjunction with UAS Traffic Management (UTM) Technology Capability Level Four (TCL-4) flight tests. For V2V implementation, two UASs were equipped with Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) radios and experiments were conducted to assess the functionality, capabilities, and limitations of DSRC-based V2V communications. Remote ID is implemented using Globally Unique Flight Identifier (GUFI) assigned to each UAS by the UAS Service Supplier (USS). This article also summarizes the critical issues and recommendations to address them.
Vehicle Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) is an emerging research area that has received much attention over the recent years. One of the main challenges of VANET is the routing protocol and the development of reliable ad-hoc communications between vehicles. We proposed a cooperative scheme between V2I and V2V communications in the highway scenarios to extend V2I connection in the uncovered areas. The main focus of this primarily work is to evaluate the communication and structure stability of the ad hoc vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) Chain branch leaf clustering scheme (CBL) in an infrastructure network. The insertion of infrastructure components is materialized by the roadside units (RSU). The results show the adaptation of the vehicle ad hoc network clustering in the presence of roadside units (RSUs).
Overhead lines or catenaries are the most common method to supply electric energy to trains, at least in modern railway lines. Electric trains collect energy using a pantograph which is in physical contact with the catenary. However, this sliding contact is not perfect because of many factors: vertical displacements, wear of the contact strip, aerodynamic effects, geometry defects, etc. These imperfections may cause sparks and electric arcs which could seriously damage the pantograph, the catenary and increase the operational costs of the railway line. The usual approach to know the condition of this contact is installing video cameras in the top of the train to determine where, when and why sparks and arcs happen. Given that both sparks and arcs cause a significant EM interference, in this paper we propose a methodology to sense the health of the catenary-pantograph contact using radio receivers tuned in the frequencies where this interference appears. The objective of this measurement campaign is not to perform an academic characterization of the physical phenomenon but to begin working on a practical condition-based maintenance system. Moreover, some early results of this work are provided based on measurements from a Metro de Madrid train in Line 6 whose voltage is 600 V DC.
When a disaster occurs, during a long period of time people suffer to have no means to communicate with their relatives. The presented work aims at proposing a solution composed of a ground station located nearby the damaged area coupled with a swarm of drones. The ground station plays the role of a gateway between cellular networks, that are still up but out of reach of people, with drones that carry messages from and to people located in the disastered region. We analyze the possibility of deploying drones with fixed positions and a more flexible solution allowing drones to move but at the cost of intermittent communications, allowing only sms-like messages. We show that using the same number of drones, allowing drones to move improves dramatically the coverage of people with respect to a FANET in which drones stay at a fixed position. We also show that even for a very restricted number of drones, for reasonable communication ranges, almost all the people benefit from an important average connected time.
The Communication Technologies for Vehicles book provides results new technologies and research in the field of intra- and inter-vehicles communications.
As the interest to improve road safety and traffic management is growing, a new generation standard for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) need to be defined to enhance the performances of the vehicular networks’ communications, in terms of reliability, latency, and throughput. Nowadays, the IEEE 802.11p related systems such as ITS-G5, are the most used C-ITS technologies in Europe. However, these radio access technologies (RATs) fall short of supporting many advanced vehicular applications’ communication requirements as high reliability, low latency, and high throughput. In this context, the IEEE 802.11bd is being defined as an amendment to IEEE 802.11p to fulfill these requirements. In this paper, we first analyze the introduced mechanisms in IEEE 802.11bd. Then, to assess its performances compared to the IEEE 802.11p, we propose a simulation-based approach by implementing this new RAT in the OMNeT++ simulator. This implementation will be tested and evaluated. We show that IEEE 802.11bd can enhance the network quality of service performance compared to IEEE 802.11p. This will allow improving road safety.
Extensibility for security monitoring in 5G vehicular networks remains largely unexplored despite strong requirements for interoperability, to support multiple properties (e.g., security, privacy, trust, sustainability) and to reach trade-offs. We discuss ITS security monitoring challenges and propose an extensible monitoring architecture to meet them. We design and implement a sample security monitoring probe for CAM and DENM and demonstrate on simulations the probe capabilities on a cooperative collision detection use case.
Efficient data collection from railway environment is crucial for railway infrastructure monitoring. Due to the various type of data to be collected from the environment, a large number of heterogeneous sensors are installed at different places on the railway infrastructure. These sensors are equipped with low-power wireless communication transceivers and grouped into Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) domains. Each WSN domain is configured to have one or multiple sink nodes (static or mobile, carried by vehicles such as trains or drones) responsible for collecting data and forwarding them outside the WSN to a cloud server. As the number of deployed WSN domains and sensor nodes rises with a high degree of heterogeneity, the tasks of data gathering, resource optimization and Quality of Service (QoS)-based service deployment become complex and highly challenging. In this paper, we propose a new generation of WSN for adaptive data collection and forwarding, called NEWNECTAR, based on the combination of both Software Defined Radio (SDR) and Software Defined Network (SDN) technologies at the sink node. NEWNECTAR defines a universal sink node thanks to the use of a programmable transceiver in forms of a General Purpose Processor (GPP)-based SDR platform, which enables the support of multiple wireless communication technologies in a single interface. Additionally, an SDN support is added to the NEWNECTAR to efficiently control the traffic forwarding from sink nodes to the cloud server and enhance its QoS profile (bandwidth, latency, reliability, etc.). Based on the proposed architecture, theoretical performance analysis of GPP-based SDR platform has been performed and its performance has been tested with varied train speeds. The result indicates that GPP-based SDR platform can collect information for trains having speeds upto 300 km/h.
In order to reach the EU’s objectives with regards to developing rail freight in the future, an evolution of the freight train is required. For that, telematics technologies play a crucial role as an enabler for the intelligent freight train. This paper shows different freight train topologies and communications technologies. Moreover, representative use cases enable the intelligent train that has connectivity capabilities such as condition monitoring for train and cargo. Furthermore, an example of intelligent freight wagon architecture is shown.
Access technologies are one of the fundamental assets of networking. Indeed, they are usually designed to optimize network performance in a given context and are therefore only well suited for targeted applications. Meanwhile, the paradigm of recent generation networks such as 5G is expected to revolutionize communication techniques by supporting a wide range of new applications that compel low latency and high data rates for both indoor and outdoor use cases. In this context, answering how should a user select an access technology at a given time while guaranteeing application needs, and leading to efficient utilization of network resources is an open research area. We survey in this paper decision-making algorithms for network selection in heterogeneous communication architectures. We also propose a taxonomy of these algorithms and carry out a discussion about common design challenges related to their applicability.
Cooperative Intelligent Transport Network is one of the most challenging issue in networking and computer science. In this area, huge amount of data are exchanged. Smart analysis of this collected data could be achieved for many purposes: traffic prediction, driver profile detection, anomaly detection, etc. Anomaly detection is an important issue for road operators. An anomaly on roads could be caused by various reasons: potholes, obstacles, weather conditions, etc. An early detection of such anomalies will reduce incident risks such as traffic jams, accidents. The aim of this paper is to collect message exchanges between vehicles and analyze trajectories. This analysis becomes difficult since a privacy principle is applied in the case of C-ITS. Indeed, each message sent is generated with an identifier of the sender. This identifier is kept only over a specified time interval thus one vehicle will have multiple identifiers. We first have to solve Trajectory-User Linking problem by chaining anonymous trajectories to potential vehicles by considering similarity in movement patterns. After that we apply various methods to check variations of trajectories from normal ones. When we observe some differences, we can raise an alarm about a potential anomaly. In order to check the validity of this work, we generated a large amount of messages exchanges by many vehicles using the Omnet simulator together with the Artery, Sumo plug-in. We applied various variations on some obtained trajectories. Finally, we ran our detection algorithm on the obtained trajectories using different parameters (angles, speed, acceleration) and obtained very interesting results in terms of detection rate.
