Wireless traffic service communication platform for cars

Rapidly changing weather conditions, especially in winter, have caused numerous disastrous traffic accidents in Northern Europe and in the Alpine region during recent years. Information about hazardous weather and road conditions is often potentially available but difficult or sometimes even impossible to deliver to drivers. This paper presents the international CARLINK (wireless platform for linking cars) project of the Celtic Cluster Programme Call 3 whose aim was to develop an intelligent wireless traffic service platform between cars supported with wireless transceivers along the roads. The project was conducted between 2006 and 2008. The platform consisted of a specific set of services, however not only these but variety of other services can be integrated to this kind of a system. Two of the major services were real-time local road weather service and incident warning service. The real-time local road weather service is a solution where up-to-date local weather related information is being collected from cruising vehicles and then further delivered to other vehicles in the area. Incident warning service operates in the same manner, but concentrates to the parameters related to traffic incidents or accidents, and (depending on seriousness of the incident) delivers a warning of such events to the vehicles in the traffic network without delay. The ultimate goal was to develop an intelligent communication platform for vehicles so that they can deliver their own observations of traffic and weather conditions to the platform core. Vehicular networking is nowadays a widely studied research field, and a large number of suggestions for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications have been presented. The focus is typically on bilateral communication between two vehicles or on broadcasting information from one vehicle or infrastructure to vehicles in the surrounding area. The CARLINK project developed an intelligent hybrid wireless traffic service platform between cars supported with wireless base stations beside the road(s). Communication between the cars were arranged in an ad-hoc manner, supported with a wireless base station connection to the backbone network, whenever possible. The ultimate goal was to enhance traffic safety and smoothness, but also to generate completely new communication entity, allowing new types of applications, services and business opportunities. Not only the encountering cars and the infrastructure can broadcast data, but all the data can be delivered instantly over the communications network to all CARLINK-compliant vehicles. High impact and extreme weather generated challenges are increasing throughout the world, not least because of the climate change. CARLINK can truly contribute to meeting these challenges. The preliminary network simulations, communication tests and weather service prototypes have already shown that a new kind of wireless communication environment can be created and it is indeed capable of enhancing traffic safety.