Field testing of Bluetooth and ZigBee technologies for vehicle-to-infrastructure applications

Vehicle to infrastructure communications (V2I) are more and more common in nowadays Intelligent Transport Systems' applications dedicated to increasing safety and reducing driving stress, or to reducing environmental pollution. Telegrams exchanged between moving vehicles and road side units (RSUs) allow the delivery of updated information to traffic participants and gathering important data regarding the number of vehicles passing a certain section of a road, vehicle density on a road section, average speed etc. However, short-range radio communications, automatic handshaking / authentication are challenging features, especially when vehicles move with high velocity. Actual technologies include DSRC and IEEE 802.x standards, but sometimes these become crowded or saturated, preventing effective data exchange. Taking these into account, additional communications technologies such as Bluetooth and ZigBee have been field-tested to evaluate the possibility of supporting extended V2I messaging facilities. Results and recommendations are presented in the paper.