Agnostic and modular architecture for the development of cooperative ITS applications

Abstract

A Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET) is a generic conceptualisation that can be applied to the communications domain of an Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). It defines requirements that allow the exchange of information between applications and services running on equipment that form a VANET, mainly moving vehicles, fixed road infrastructure's systems and mobile personal devices. In this unique and demanding environment, interoperability is attained through the use of specific wireless communications technologies and protocols. The great heterogeneity on the capabilities of the interconnected devices, the scale of the number of devices that could be involved, the various degrees of density and the complexity on the mobility patterns, makes interoperability at the application level a challenging problem. This paper presents an agnostic VANET architecture, adapted from ETSI and ISO modern standards, to be deployed on ITS as a mean to overcome those limitations. This new approach fosters the use of different communication technologies and network/transport protocol stacks in an open and modular framework, facilitating the creation of ITS cooperative applications and services, using traditional network programming paradigms where applications use the available medium transparently. The usefulness and versatility of the proposed architecture have been illustrated by means of two different applications that have been taken from simulation scenarios into use cases, really deployed on top of commercially available On Board Units.