Intelligent Vehicle Communications Technology for the Development of Smart Cities

Abstract

Vehicle safety and mobility concerns have become a significant problem for governments and car manufacturers in the last few years. The development of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) has favorite researchers in industries and academia to put many research efforts into improving road traffic safety and efficiency. The communication systems allowing vehicles to participate in communication networks have advanced significantly with wireless technologies’ evolution. Thus, new types of networks, such as intelligent vehicle communications (IVCs), have been designed to establish communication between vehicles themselves and between vehicles and infrastructure. New concepts where IVCs have a crucial role have been proposed, such as smart cities and their subsystems. Smart cities include intelligent road safety and traffic management systems in which road traffic information could be reachable at any time and place. Thus, it was necessary to develop new architectures and standard specifications for telecommunications and information exchange for vehicular networks. For these reasons, this chapter introduces the reader to IVCs and their enabling technologies. We focused on presenting challenges relating to IVC technologies in road traffic environments. We outlined some popular standards, namely, DSRC/WAVE, 802.11p by IEEE, CALM by ISO, ITSC by ETSI. Then, we have explored possible network architectures and applications of IVCs. Finally, we concluded the chapter by pointing to open problems related to smart city applications and future research directions.