Grant: Idea to Innovation

The new paradigm of vehicular networks will be the key technology to enable various applications for improving road safety, intelligent transportation, and in-vehicle infotainment. Vehicular networks consist of vehicle on board units (OBUs) and road side units (RSUs) to support vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, to be deployed in the next few years. The current solution for radio channel access is based on the IEEE 802.11p standard, which is contention-based and therefore cannot meet the service requirements for delivering safety messages. As a result, we have developed a new channel access protocol, VeMAC, which overcomes the limitations of current solution in safety message broadcasting. For efficient and reliable safety message delivery, in this project, we will investigate how to integrate VeMAC with the existing 802.11p solution, and develop a product which can be plugged in to the OBUs and RSUs, without changing the technology currently under development by both telecom and automobile industries for connecting vehicles. The product is expected to significantly enhance the performance of IEEE 802.11p in high priority safety applications, by reducing the probability of transmission collisions of a safety message and ensuring an acceptable delivery delay of each safety message to all the surrounding vehicles and RSUs. In the current early stage of vehicular network technology development, our product will be the first to provide a significant improvement to the IEEE 802.11p standard in supporting road safety applications. This project will result in significant benefits to Canadian users, especially in improving road safety and in reducing financial loss caused by the societal and economic harm of road traffic accidents. Furthermore, the outcome of the project will contribute to an advantage position for Canada in the intelligent transportation systems sector.