Dedicated Short-range Communications for ITS — Trends in Research , Development and Standardization

In March, 2001, full-fledged operation of an “Electronic Toll Collection” (ETC) system was launched in the Chiba area of Japan. ETC is a system for processing automatic toll collection, using wireless communications between communication equipment installed in toll gates and other units on passing vehicles. This road-to-vehicle communications by means of wireless is called “Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC), and plans are being made to applying it to areas of use besides ETC. ETC and other systems to which DSRC has been applied hold an important place in the growing field of “Intelligent Transport Systems” (ITS) and they are being adopted overseas as well as in Japan. DSRC is different from other mobile communications systems, and has the feature that, within a limited area, it can transmit large volumes of data accurately and reliably. In this paper, we introduce the DSRC research and development work which our company has been putting efforts into, and discuss trends in standardization. Trends in DSRC Research and Development Developments related to DSRC have a long history, having begun in the 1980’s with the “Road / Automobile Communication System” (RACS). RACS was proposed by our company at a time when the basic concept of DSRC was not widely familiar. RACS included the concept, advanced at that time, that a variety of ITS applications could be implemented using a single wireless communication system. The results of the RACS research and development effort was superseded by research, development and actualization of the “Vehicle Information & Communication System” (VICS). In addition, from 1995 ~ 1996, government / private cooperative research on ETC was conducted and DSRC research and development was done, focusing on a few approaches. Our company participated in this research and development and we were later able to apply the results of the cooperative research in drafting DSRC standards for application to ETC. Then, from 1998 to 2000, some further research and development projects on applications of DSRC were done in Japan. As typical examples the R & D projects of the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) and of the Telecommunications Advancement Organization of Japan (TAO) in which our company and others participated can be cited. The NEDO research and development was a project called “R & D for Technology Applicable to DSRC/ITS On-board Equipments” which was contracted to JSK (Association of Electronic Technology for Automobile Traffic and Driving) and accomplished through the cooperation of 15 affiliate companies. In this project, several DSRC-related research and development themes were taken up, such as “R & D on a platform for applying DSRC,” and R & D was conducted on expanding use of ETC on-board Equipments and on making DSRC more multi-purpose. “A platform for applying DSRC,” which was one of the themes, is a common foundation for efficiently developing and running a variety of ITS applications that use DSRC. With this platform, adding or changing application programs can be done easily. It provides a general-purpose interface between DSRC and the application program, and also software processing functions which can be made common to various kinds of applications. Figure 1 shows a conceptual drawing of the platform for applying DSRC. To deal with the four subjects of handling large information volumes, high-speed processing, guaranteeing security, and application to low resource on-board equip-