BESAFE: Design and Implementation of a DSRC-Based Test-Bed for Connected Autonomous Vehicles

There is a recent effort at One-North key signalized intersections to setup DSRC road-side beacon infrastructure to support Singapore Autonomous Vehicles (AV) trials. Unlike conventional AVs that operate in independent sensing mode, the notion of employing DSRC-equipped beacons is to augment AVs' operation and offer key benefits such as improved situational awareness and sensing-range extension. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a DSRC-based road-side beaconing system, called BESAFE, for allowing real-time information sharing with AVs. BESAFE framework supports the dissemination of: (i) traffic light status, (ii) GNSS positioning augmentation, (iii) surrounding traffic information, and (iv) collection of vehicle probe data and node infrastructure status. A key design principle of BESAFE is the full compliance of international standards of DSRC/WAVE, IEEE 1609.x, and SAE J2735, so as to ensure interoperability between infrastructure provider and different AV operators. Several important protocol design considerations have been discussed, including the software architecture, service discovery via WSA, application layer messaging, frame routing and node status reporting. To assure different AV operators to use the common test-bed infrastructure, the basic BESAFE framework is also extended by incorporating security mechanism of enhanced encryption and frame signing.