New cooperative intelligent transportation system (C-ITS) applications become enabled thanks to advances in communication technologies between vehicles(V2V) and with the infrastructure (V2I). Communicating vehicles share information with each other and cooperate, which results in improved safety, fuel economy, and traffic efficiency. An example of a C-ITS application is platooning, which comprises a string of vehicles that travel together with short inter-vehicle distances (IVDs). Any solution related to C-ITS must comply with high safety requirements in order to pass standardization and be commercially deployed. Furthermore, trusted safety levels should be assured even for critical scenarios. This thesis studies the conditions that guarantee safety in emergency braking scenarios for heterogeneous platooning, or string-like, formations of vehicles. In such scenarios, the vehicle at the head of the string emergency brakes and all following vehicles have to automatically react in time to avoid rear-end collisions. The reaction time can be significantly decreased with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication usage since the leader can explicitly inform other platooning members about the critical braking. The safety analysis conducted in the thesis yields computationally efficient methods and algorithms for calculating minimum inter-vehicle distances that allow avoiding rear-end collisions with a predefined high guarantee. These IVDs are theoretically obtained for an open-loop and a closed-loop configurations. The former implies that follower drives with a constant velocity until braking starts, whereas in the latter, an adaptive cruise control (ACC) with a constant-distance policy serves as a controller. In addition, further optimization of inter-vehicle distances in the platoon is carried out under an assumption of centralized control. Such an approach allows achieving better fuel consumption and road utilization. The performed analytical comparison suggests that our proposed V2V communication based solution is superior to classical automated systems, such as automatic emergency braking system (AEBS), which utilizes only onboard sensors and no communication. Wireless communication, enabling to know the intentions of other vehicles almost immediately, allows for smaller IVDs whilst guaranteeing the same level of safety. Overall, the presented thesis highlights the importance of C-ITS and, specifically, V2V in the prevention of rear-end collisions in emergency scenarios. Future work directions include an extension of the obtained results by considering more advanced models of vehicles, environment, and communication settings; and applying the proposed algorithms of safety guaranteeing to other controllers, such as ACC with a constant time headway policy.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a hot topic in the intelligent transport system (ITS) area. The introduction of wireless communications between vehicles will enable many useful applications to enhance road traffic safety as well to increase efficiency. The standardization of IEEE 802.11p, being an amendment to IEEE 802.11 intended for VANETS, faces many challenges. In Europe a 30 MHz spectrum at 5.9 GHz have been dedicated for ITS and this spectrum has to be used to its full potential. For this reason this thesis compares a 20 MHz wide frequency channel with a 10 MHz wide through measurements using 802.11p hardware. The measurements were conducted on a highway with relative speeds of up to 240 km/h. The results from these initial measurements show that a 20 MHz channel does not perform worse than a 10 MHz channel despite the high relative speeds and large metal signs scattering the signals. What enabled this thesis to do the measurements was Halmstad University‟s participation in the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC) 2011. In GCDC nine teams mostly from Europe competed in having the vehicle that had the best behaviour in a platoon of vehicles using cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC), the CACC algorithm controlled the vehicles‟ acceleration and breaking autonomously based on in-vehicle sensors and communicated messages between the vehicles in the platoon using 802.11p. This thesis implemented the communication part of Halmstad University‟s vehicle. The challenge was held in Helmond, Holland, May 14-15, 2011. Halmstad University‟s team finished in second place. / CoAct

Dans le cadre du développement des innovations dans les Systèmes de Transport Intelligents, les véhicules connectés devront être capables de télécharger des informations basées sur la position sur et depuis des serveurs distants. Ces véhicules seront équipés avec des différentes technologies d’accès radio, telles que les réseaux cellulaires ou les réseaux véhicule-à-véhicule (V2V) comme IEEE 802.11p. Les réseaux cellulaires, avec une couverture presque omniprésente, fournissent un accès à internet avec garanties de qualité de service. Cependant, l’accès à ces réseaux est payant. Dans cette thèse, un algorithme de clustering multi-saut est proposé avec pour objectif de réduire le coût d’accès au réseau cellulaire en agrégeant des données sur le réseau V2V. Pour faire ceci, le leader du cluster (CH, de l’anglais Cluster Head) est utilisé comme passerelle unique vers le réseau cellulaire. Pour le test d’une application d’exemple pour télécharger du Floating Car Data agrégé, les résultats des simulations montrent que cette approche réduit l’utilisation du réseau cellulaire de plus de 80%, en s’attaquant à la redondance typique des données basées sur la position dans les réseaux véhiculaires. Il y a une contribution en trois parties : Premièrement, une approche pour déléguer la sélection du CH à la station de base du réseau cellulaire afin de maximiser la taille des clusters, et par conséquent le taux de compression. Deuxièmement, un algorithme auto-adaptatif qui change dynamiquement le nombre maximum de sauts afin de maintenir un équilibre entre la réduction des coûts d’accès au réseau cellulaire et le taux de perte de paquets dans le réseau V2V. Finalement, l’incorporation d’une théorie de la justice distributive, afin d’améliorer l’équité sur la durée concernant la distribution des coûts auxquels les CH doivent faire face, améliorant ainsi l’acceptabilité sociale de la proposition. Les algorithmes proposés ont été testés via simulation, et les résultats montrent une réduction significative dans l’utilisation du réseau cellulaire, une adaptation réussie du nombre de sauts aux changements de la densité du trafic véhiculaire, et une amélioration dans les métriques d’équité, sans affecter la performance des réseaux. / For the development of innovative Intelligent Transportation Systems applications, connected vehicles will frequently need to upload and download position-based information to and from servers. These vehicles will be equipped with different Radio Access Technologies (RAT), like cellular and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technologies such as LTE and IEEE 802.11p respectively. Cellular networkscan provide internet access almost anywhere, with QoS guarantees. However, accessing these networks has an economic cost. In this thesis, a multi-hop clustering algorithm is proposed in the aim of reducing the cellular access costs by aggregating information and off-loading data in the V2V network, using the Cluster Head as a single gateway to the cellular network. For the example application of uploading aggregated Floating Car Data, simulation results show that this approach reduce cellular data consumption by more than 80% by reducing the typical redundancy of position-based data in a vehicular network. There is a threefold contribution: First, an approach that delegates the Cluster Head selection to the cellular base station in order to maximize the cluster size, thus maximizing aggregation. Secondly, a self-adaptation algorithm that dynamically changes the maximum number of hops, addressing the trade-off between cellular access reduction and V2V packet loss. Finally, the incorporation of a theory of distributive justice, for improving fairness over time regarding the distribution of the cost in which Cluster Heads have to incur, thus improving the proposal’s social acceptability. The proposed algorithms were tested via simulation, and the results show a significant reduction in cellular network usage, a successful adaptation of the number of hops to changes in the vehicular traffic density, and an improvement in fairness metrics, without affecting network performance.

<p>This licentiate thesis work investigates two medium access control (MAC) methods, when used in traffic safety applications over vehicular <em>ad hoc</em> networks (VANETs). The MAC methods are carrier sense multiple access (CSMA), as specified by the leading standard for VANETs IEEE 802.11p, and self-organizing time-division multiple access (STDMA) as used by the leading standard for transponders on ships. All vehicles in traffic safety applications periodically broadcast cooperative awareness messages (CAMs). The CAM based data traffic implies requirements on a predictable, fair and scalable medium access mechanism. The investigated performance measures are <em>channel access delay</em>, <em>number of consecutive packet drops</em> and the <em>distance between concurrently transmitting nodes</em>. Performance is evaluated by computer simulations of a highway scenario in which all vehicles broadcast CAMs with different update rates and packet lengths. The obtained results show that nodes in a CSMA system can experience <em>unbounded channel access delays</em> and further that there is a significant difference between the best case and worst case channel access delay that a node could experience. In addition, with CSMA there is a very high probability that several <em>concurrently transmitting nodes are located close to each other</em>. This occurs when nodes start their listening periods at the same time or when nodes choose the same backoff value, which results in nodes starting to transmit at the same time instant. The CSMA algorithm is therefore both <em>unpredictable</em> and <em>unfair</em> besides the fact that it <em>scales badly</em> for broadcasted CAMs. STDMA, on the other hand, will always grant channel access for all packets before a predetermined time, regardless of the number of competing nodes. Therefore, the STDMA algorithm is <em>predictable</em> and <em>fair</em>. STDMA, using parameter settings that have been adapted to the vehicular environment, is shown to outperform CSMA when considering the performance measure <em>distance between concurrently transmitting nodes</em>. In CSMA the distance between concurrent transmissions is random, whereas STDMA uses the side information from the CAMs to properly schedule concurrent transmissions in space. The price paid for the superior performance of STDMA is the required network synchronization through a global navigation satellite system, e.g., GPS. That aside since STDMA was shown to be scalable, predictable and fair; it is an excellent candidate for use in VANETs when complex communication requirements from traffic safety applications should be met.</p>

Les réseaux véhiculaires font l'objet de recherches actives aussi bien dans le domaine des réseaux que dans celui des transports. Le potentiel des réseaux véhiculaires à fournir des services comme l'information sur le trafic en temps réel ou sur les accidents font de cette technologie un domaine de recherche très important. Ces réseaux peuvent comporter des communications véhicule-à-véhicule (V2V), véhicule-à-infrastructure (V2I), ou une combinaison des deux. La norme IEEE 1609.4 est la spécification multicanal pour l'IEEE802.11p/WAVE des réseaux véhiculaires (VANETs). Elle utilise sept canaux, l'un étant un canal de contrôle (CCH) qui est écouté par les équipements de façon périodique, et les six autres canaux sont utilisés comme canaux de service (SCH). Elle définit également une division du temps en alternance entre les intervalles CCH et les intervalles SCH. L'objet de cette thèse de doctorat est d'évaluer les performances des réseaux VANETs dans le cas des communications véhiculaires sans infrastructure, et au niveau des couches inférieures du standard 802.11p. Dans la première partie, nous proposons une approche MAC d'allocation multicanal opportuniste dans un contexte sans infrastructure. Cette approche est conforme à la norme IEEE1609.4 -2010 de l'architecture WAVE pour un fonctionnement multicanal, et elle est conçue pour des applications de services de données (non urgentes), tout en assurant la transmission des messages de sécurité routière et des paquets de contrôle. Pour maintenir la qualité de service des deux types de messages (urgents et non-urgents) en exploitant la capacité du canal, deux solutions sont proposées. Dans la deuxième partie, lorsque le véhicule sélectionne son canal et contrôle son alternance temporelle entre CCH et SCH, il commence à transmettre ses paquets, en particulier sur le canal CCH, lesquels ont une durée de péremption. Nous présentons une approche visant à minimiser les collisions des émetteurs tout en évitant la contention de début d'intervalle, en particulier dans un contexte de densité élevée de véhicules. Même si les mécanismes proposés ci-dessus diminuent le taux de collision, il n'est pas possible de les supprimer complètement. Dans la troisième partie, nous traitons le problème des collisions entre les paquets diffusés sur le CCH, en particulier quand la charge des messages transmis dépasse la capacité du canal. Pour cela, nous proposons un nouveau mécanisme de codage réseau analogique adapté à la modulation QPSK pour les messages diffusés sur le CCH. Dans cette approche des symboles connus sont envoyés avant d'envoyer les paquets pour estimer les paramètres du canal et une solution explicite est utilisée pour inverser le système de la superposition de deux paquets

Road accidents represent a serious social problem and are one of the leading causes of human death and disability on a global scale. To reduce the risk and severity of a road accident, a variety of new safety applications can be realized through wireless communications among vehicles driving nearby each other, or among vehicles and especially deployed road side units (RSUs), a technology known as a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). Most of the VANET-enabled safety applications are based on broadcasting of safety messages by vehicles or RSUs, either periodically or in case of an unexpected event, such as a hard brake or dangerous road condition detection. Each broadcast safety message should be successfully delivered to the surrounding vehicles and RSUs without any excess delay, which is one of the main functions of a medium access control (MAC) protocol proposed for VANETs. This thesis presents VeMAC, a new multichannel time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol specifically designed to support the high priority safety applications in a VANET scenario. The ability of the VeMAC protocol to deliver periodic and event-driven safety messages in VANETs is demonstrated by a detailed delivery delay analysis, including queueing and service delays, for both types of safety messages. As well, computer simulations are conducted by using MATLAB, the network simulator ns-2, and the microscopic vehicle traffic simulator VISSIM, in order to evaluate the performance of the VeMAC protocol, in comparison with the IEEE 802.11p standard and the ADHOC MAC protocol (another TDMA protocol proposed for ad hoc networks). A real city scenario is simulated and different performance metrics are evaluated, including the network goodput, protocol overhead, channel utilization, protocol fairness, probability of a transmission collision, and safety message delivery delay. It is shown that the VeMAC protocol considerably outperforms the existing MAC schemes, which have significant limitations in supporting VANET safety applications. In addition to enhancing road safety, in-vehicle Internet access is one of the main applications of VANETs, which aims at providing the vehicle passengers with a low-cost access to the Internet via on-road gateways. This thesis presents a new strategy for deploying Internet gateways on the roads, in order to minimize the total cost of gateway deployment, while ensuring that a vehicle can connect to an Internet gateway (using multihop communications) with a probability greater than a specified threshold. This cost minimization problem is formulated by using binary integer programming, and applied for optimal gateway placement in a real city scenario. To the best of our knowledge, no previous strategy for gateway deployment has considered the probability of multihop connectivity among the vehicles and the deployed gateways. In order to allow a vehicle to discover the existence of an Internet gateway and to communicate with the gateway via multihops, a novel data packet routing scheme is proposed based on the VeMAC protocol. The performance of this cross-layer design is evaluated for a multichannel VANET in a highway scenario, mainly in terms of the end-to-end packet delivery delay. The packet queueing at each relay vehicle is considered in the end-to-end delay analysis, and numerical results are presented to study the effect of various parameters, such as the vehicle density and the packet arrival rate, on the performance metrics. The proposed VeMAC protocol is a promising candidate for MAC in VANETs, which can realize many advanced safety applications to enhance the public safety standards and improve the safety level of drivers/passengers and pedestrians on roads. On the other hand, the proposed gateway placement strategy and packet routing scheme represent a strong step toward providing reliable and ubiquitous in-vehicle Internet connectivity.

This licentiate thesis work investigates two medium access control (MAC) methods, when used in traffic safety applications over vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). The MAC methods are carrier sense multiple access (CSMA), as specified by the leading standard for VANETs IEEE 802.11p, and self-organizing time-division multiple access (STDMA) as used by the leading standard for transponders on ships. All vehicles in traffic safety applications periodically broadcast cooperative awareness messages (CAMs). The CAM based data traffic implies requirements on a predictable, fair and scalable medium access mechanism. The investigated performance measures are channel access delay, number of consecutive packet drops and the distance between concurrently transmitting nodes. Performance is evaluated by computer simulations of a highway scenario in which all vehicles broadcast CAMs with different update rates and packet lengths. The obtained results show that nodes in a CSMA system can experience unbounded channel access delays and further that there is a significant difference between the best case and worst case channel access delay that a node could experience. In addition, with CSMA there is a very high probability that several concurrently transmitting nodes are located close to each other. This occurs when nodes start their listening periods at the same time or when nodes choose the same backoff value, which results in nodes starting to transmit at the same time instant. The CSMA algorithm is therefore both unpredictable and unfair besides the fact that it scales badly for broadcasted CAMs. STDMA, on the other hand, will always grant channel access for all packets before a predetermined time, regardless of the number of competing nodes. Therefore, the STDMA algorithm is predictable and fair. STDMA, using parameter settings that have been adapted to the vehicular environment, is shown to outperform CSMA when considering the performance measure distance between concurrently transmitting nodes. In CSMA the distance between concurrent transmissions is random, whereas STDMA uses the side information from the CAMs to properly schedule concurrent transmissions in space. The price paid for the superior performance of STDMA is the required network synchronization through a global navigation satellite system, e.g., GPS. That aside since STDMA was shown to be scalable, predictable and fair; it is an excellent candidate for use in VANETs when complex communication requirements from traffic safety applications should be met.

This thesis is a proof-of-concept project that aims at modify and reuse existing communication protocols of wireless vehicle to vehicle communication in order to build a prototype of a real time graphical application that runs in an embedded environment. The application is a 2D visualization of the flow of material at a quarry and is built on top of existing communication protocols that enable wireless vehicle to vehicle communication according to the 802.11p standard for intelligent transport solutions. These communication protocols have already been used within the Volvo group in other research rojects, but not in a context of a real-time graphical 2D visualization. The application runs on an ALIX embedded motherboard and combined with the necessary hardware represent one node that makes the communication network. The visualization monitors the position of every active node in the network and the flow of material between material locations and crusher that process the material at the quarry. The visualization is implemented in C/C++ using Qt 4.6.2 Graphics View framework.

Les réseaux ad hoc de véhicules accueillent une multitude d’applications intéressantes. Parmi celles-ci, les applications d’info-divertissement visent à améliorer l’expérience des passagers. Ces applications ont des exigences rigides en termes de délai de livraison et de débit. De nombreuses approches ont été proposées pour assurer la qualité du service des dites applications. Elles sont réparties en deux couches : réseau et contrôle d’accès. Toutefois, ces méthodes présentent plusieurs lacunes. Cette thèse a trois volets. Le premier aborde la question du routage dans le milieu urbain. A cet égard, un nouveau protocole, appelé SCRP, a été proposé. Il exploite l’information sur la circulation des véhicules en temps réel pour créer des épines dorsales sur les routes et les connecter aux intersections à l’aide des nœuds de pont. Ces derniers collectent des informations concernant la connectivité et le délai, utilisées pour choisir les chemins de routage ayant un délai de bout-en-bout faible. Le deuxième s’attaque au problème d’affectation des canaux de services afin d’augmenter le débit. A cet effet, un nouveau mécanisme, appelé ASSCH, a été conçu. ASSCH collecte des informations sur les canaux en temps réel et les donne à un modèle stochastique afin de prédire leurs états dans l’avenir. Les canaux les moins encombrés sont sélectionnés pour être utilisés. Le dernier volet vise à proposer un modèle analytique pour examiner la performance du mécanisme EDCA de la norme IEEE 802.11p. Ce modèle tient en compte plusieurs facteurs, dont l’opportunité de transmission, non exploitée dans IEEE 802.11p. / The fact that vehicular ad hoc network accommodates two types of communications, Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure, has opened the door for a plethora of interesting applications to thrive. Some of these applications, known as infotainment applications, focus on enhancing the passengers' experience. They have rigid requirements in terms of delivery delay and throughput. Numerous approaches have been proposed, at medium access control and routing layers, to enhance the quality of service of such applications. However, existing schemes have several shortcomings. Subsequently, the design of new and efficient approaches is vital for the proper functioning of infotainment applications. This work proposes three schemes. The first is a novel routing protocol, labeled SCRP. It leverages real-time vehicular traffic information to create backbones over road segments and connect them at intersections using bridge nodes. These nodes are responsible for collecting connectivity and delay information, which are used to select routing paths with low end-to-end delay. The second is an altruistic service channel selection scheme, labeled ASSCH. It first collects real-time service channels information and feeds it to a stochastic model that predicts the state of these channels in the near future. The least congested channels are then selected to be used. The third is an analytical model for the performance of the IEEE 802.11p Enhanced Distributed Channel Access mechanism that considers various factors, including the transmission opportunity (TXOP), unexploited by IEEE 802.11p.

Disertační práce je zaměřena na měření a modelování kanálu uvnitř a vně vozidla pro komunikaci a lokalizaci. Pro účely vytvoření integrovaného inteligentního dopravního systému ITS (Intelligent transportation system) je důležitý odhad vlastnosti kanálů pro vnitřní a venkovní scénáře. Za tímto účelem je vhodné provést řadu činností, které jsou obsahem disertační práce: Simulace fyzické vrstvy 802.11p, její srovnávání s 802.11a, měření kanálu pro různé scénáře pro 802.11p a pro širokopásmový systém (UWB), vytvoření modelů kanálů pro 802.11p a UWB a výzkum vlastností lokalizace založené na měření v pásmu UWB. Výzkum komunikace vozidla s okolím založená na IEEE 802.11p standardu. Jedním z cílů disertační práce je ukázat rozdíly mezi standardy fyzické vrstvy IEEE 802.11a a IEEE 802.11p prostřednictvím simulace s použitím modelu kanálu HIPERPLAN/2. V práci je uvedena simulace přenosu signálu 802.11p kanálem ITU-R M.1225 s odlišným zpožděním a středním výkonem (pro chodce a vozidla). Vliv kanálu na signál je analyzován za použití simulace v prostředí MATLABu pomocí vyhodnocení chybovosti. Určení vlastností kanálů v kmitočtovém pásmu 5,8 GHz pro standard IEEE 802.11p a UWB. Experimenty byly prováděny pro vnitřní a vnější prostředí vozidla. Bylo zjištěno, že pro protokol 802.11p může být trend (dlouhodobý vývoj) profilu PDP (power delay profile) nejlépe aproximován pomocí modelu obsahujícího dvě klesající exponenciální funkce, na rozdíl od Saleh-Valenzuelova (S-V) modelu, který je více vhodný pro UWB systémy pracující v pásmu 3 až 11 GHz. Vytvoření odpovídající impulzní odezvy (CIR) s využitím trendu PDP. Informace o CIR byla použita pro simulaci 802.11p za účelem vyhodnocení chybovosti při použití Ricianova modelu. Výsledky odhadu BER ukazují vhodnost protokolu pro vnitřní a vnější prostředí bezdrátových aplikací. Výsledky simulací dále ukazují, že se chybovost zásadně nemění a proto je možné určit střední křivku BER pro celou sadu změřených dat. Určení vlivu malé změny polohy antény na vlastnosti kanálu. Práce ukazuje náhodnost parametrů UWB kanálu pro malé změny polohy antény okolo vozidla, zaparkovaného v podzemní garáži. Ztráty šířením jsou monotónně rostoucí se vzdáleností, avšak náhodně se mění v závislosti na úhlu a výšce antén, a proto je vyhodnocení vzdálenosti pomocí síly signálu pro tyto scénáře nevhodné. Na druhé straně může být pro spolehlivé určení vzdálenosti bez ohledu na úhel nebo výšku antény použita doba příchodu prvního svazku. Ověření vlivu změn konfigurace kanálu na parametry S-V modelu. Práce demonstruje závislost parametrů Saleh-Valenzuela modelu v na vzdálenosti a výšce antén, avšak ukazuje, že jejich průměrné hodnoty jsou blízké IEEE 802.15.3 standardu. Ověření možnosti lokalizace pomocí metody TOA (time of arrival). Vzdálenost mezi anténami byla určena z profilu PDP s využitím lineární závislosti vzdálenosti na zpoždění. Souřadnice vysílací antény byly nalezeny pomocí dvou přijímacích antén pomocí 2-D lokalizační techniky TOA. Porovnání vypočtených souřadnic s původními vykazuje chybu menší než 6%, což ukazuje vhodnost navrženého přístupu pro lokalizaci vozidel.