California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This paper presents the communication needs between vehicles and the roadside infrastructure for IVHS applications. The requirements of each application, in terms of message length, frequency, and acceptable delay, are estimated. Based on these estimates, we assess the amount of radio spectrum needed to support these applications. We find that about 1.2 MHz is required to support full highway coverage. We discuss the topology and capacity allocation problems for the road-based network and present one possible implementation. We show a case study of network design and link capacity calculation for the San Francisco Bay Area highway system, as an illustration of the proposed solution. The results provide an indication for the communication media suitable for the network.