Chapter 1 Introduction: intelligent vehicular communications

1.4
VEHICULAR COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES
By means of the development and extension of wireless communication technologies, substantial re-
search efforts have been made in the area of vehicular network. The objective is to increase driver safety 
and comfort by relaying required information from vehicle to vehicle. Future vehicles are expected to 
anticipate and avoid possible collisions, navigate the quickest route to their destination making use of 
up-to-the-minute traffic reports, identify the nearest available parking slot, and minimize their carbon 
emissions. One of the most important challenges to convert all these dreams into reality is that these 
future applications have diverse communication requirements and will be used in different countries 
following different traffic rules and even different legal frequency bands. Therefore, understanding the 
communication requirements of target applications is key to selecting an appropriate communication 
channel. To achieve this, we need to define a set of communication parameters on the basis of which we 
can judge the suitability of a communication medium within a particular environment.

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16
CHAPTER 1 
INTRODUCTION: INTELLIGENT VEHICULAR COMMUNICATIONS
The vehicular standards are dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) and IEEE 802.11p; oth-
er than that, researchers are working on short-range communication protocols such as Zigbee, Wi-Fi, 
and so forth. Several technologies are involved in vehicular ad hoc networks, especially as enablers of 
ITS. These are GSM, UMTS, WiMAX limited Wi-Fi, and a new and specific technology for these kind 
of applications, namely WAVE, also known as IEEE 802.11/p [11]. This implicitly suggests that a car 
should have on board different radio interfaces (and/or network card). WAVE is a member of the IEEE 
802.11 family. This suggests that this solution (currently at the stage of draft) is borrowed from IEEE 
802.11 and adapted for the vehicular context. The vehicular communication scenario can be classified 
according to a range of communication between vehicles or between infrastructures as depicted in 
Fig. 1.3
. The following are the classifications of vehicular communication scenarios:
• existing vehicular communication
• possible vehicular communication
In ITS the communication technologies can classify as traditional or existing mode of communi-
cation and then the possible or favorite mode of communication technologies as depicted in 
Fig. 1.3
, 
which is discussed in the next section.