Europe: Chatty cars

Rohde and Schwarz has a long legacy of providing test and measurement solutions in all fields of wireless communications. So why not cars? They recently announced a fully automated standard-compliant testing system for the components of car-to-car connectivity utilizing the IEEE 802.11p standard.
Just in case you’re not familiar with this standard, this is an IEEE approved standard within the 802.11 family specifically for wireless access in vehicular environments. It defines enhancements to this Wi-Fi standard in support of “intelligent transport systems” to include data exchange between high-speed vehicles and roadside infrastructure. This does not currently have applications related to communications between the vehicle drivers themselves.
Additionally, there is an ETSI standard to focus in this area. This is ETSI EN 302 571 and applies to vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure and infrastructure-to-vehicle ITS. This standard includes specifications related to the “on-board equipment” in the vehicle and the “road-side equipment” within road infrastructure.
Maybe it’s helpful to visualize a few applications for 802.11p. You’re driving down the road and you encounter unsafe road conditions: could be something with the road itself like icy conditions or a sudden traffic situation causing a sudden stop. Today you and your vehicle deal with that situation and move on, basically keeping that information to yourself.
With Wi-Fi connectivity between vehicles and roadside infrastructure, this information can be shared to help reduce the impact of unknown safety issues on the roadway ahead. This functionality is used in a broadcast mode, with your vehicle communicating this information to all like-equipped vehicles and roadside infrastructure who continue to broadcast this information once it is received to reach a wider section of those vehicles who might make use of this data.
There’s a lot of discussion as to also providing similar functionality through the mobile network and the cloud. The question here focuses on speed. The Wi-Fi network is simply between the vehicles and is broadcasting. It doesn’t need to compete with other traffic traversing the network and it doesn’t need to traverse the mobile operators infrastructure to reach the cloud and return with the information to be shared. If Wi-Fi is quicker today, will it still be when LTE arrives? Stay tuned in this space as many players continue to work to resolve this challenge and the number of networks in vehicles increases everyday. At some point it’s got to become a challenge from an interference, functionality and available space within the vehicle perspective.
Speaking of interference, this is one of the areas Rohde & Schwarz is addressing with their test system. At the simplest level there are two areas of focus – is the data getting from point A (vehicle or infrastructure) to point B (vehicle or infrastructure) with less then 10% packet loss, and is this traffic interfering with any other frequency that co-exists with the 5 GHz band?
Rhode and Schwarz provided a demo of their system for RF conformance testing in support of regulatory test requirements, you can view the demo here. It is very simple to set up with pre-configured tests that allows you to set the parameters of the environment you want to model on a case-by-case basis. The reporting is presented at a summary and test-by-test level and provides pass/fail measurements along with graphical representations of the power output and packet loss situation.
As the industry works to define car-to-car communications vs. connectivity vs. connected car definitions, there will many new market entrants and much confusion as things get sorted out. RCR Wireless News will continue to provide commentary (and hopefully some clarity) as this all unfolds.