Application and performance of CEN-DSRC to the smart tachograph

Abstract

The digital tachograph (DT) is a device installed in commercial vehicles above 3.5 tonnes in Europe to monitor the driving time of commercial drivers. The DT is based on a European regulation, which has been revised in February 2014 with new features like the provision of wireless communications for targeted checks by law enforcers on the road. The proposed wireless communication technology is based on the CEN (Comite Europeen de Normalisation) dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) at 5.8 GHz. Even if the CEN-DSRC standard is widely deployed for tolling applications and various studies have already been performed, the use cases defined for the new version of the DT can be quite different from the existing ones. This paper analyses the application of CEN-DSRC to the DT, discusses the benefits for law enforcers, and proposes a feasibility study to evaluate the transmission and reception of data from the DT. The potential scenarios are described and the layer 1 and 2 aspects of the CEN-DSRC are extensively treated. The study provides the achievable range in communication, the corresponding bit error rate (BER) analysis and the time delay in completing a transaction between the CEN-DSRC module installed in the truck and the reader used by the law enforcers.