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EU Reserves a Frequency For Talking Cars

Posted by kdawson on from the long-as-they-don't-use-cell-phones dept.

Iddo Genuth writes "The European Commission has recently decided to reserve, across Europe, part of the radio spectrum for smart vehicle communications systems. The decision is part of the Commission's overall fight against road accidents and traffic jams, and the hope is that vehicles' developers will create wireless communication technology that will allow cars to 'talk' to other cars and to the road infrastructure providers."

4 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. CVIS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    That's just a small part of what is happening.

    Just look here: http://www.cvisproject.org/
    Company I work for is involved in this project. And it looks promising. Might take years before safety related features are implemented. But it will probably start with smarter route planners, and traffic signs that can make more intelligent planning by knowing where people want to go.

    (AC for a reason)

  2. More information by martimo · · Score: 5, Informative

    One of the main european research projects behind this is CVIS: http://www.cvisproject.org/ . There is lots of documentation already...

    1. Re:More information by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Wow...something we actually beat Europe to, technology-wise? In the US, the initiative is called VII, or Vehicle Infrastructure Integration. It also uses a chunk of the 5.9 GHz spectrum, under the 802.11p specification.

      A lot of the ideas they have kicking around are forming a giant mesh network that will alert drivers in-vehicle about traffic conditions ahead, or vehicles "warning" each other when they get too close. A lot of it will come down to individual device/auto designers, as the most basic VII-enabled system will just communicate with other devices like a giant RFID tag ("I'm here!"), while others should be integrated GPS, etc.

      For those of you wondering, yes, the DOT wants to use this information like they do with toll transponders, cellphone trackers, and license plate readers, and other discrete detection systems: for traffic flow information for average speeds. That way they can do traffic analysis as well as notify the public of where traffic slowdowns are. (Traffic counts and density will still have to rely on aggregate detectors such as loops and radars, since not every vehicle in the traffic flow will have a transponder for quite some time). To avoid the chicken-and-egg syndrome (the infrastructure is in place, but vehicles don't have these systems), the DOT has gotten agreements so far from every major auto manufacturer to include some form of VII in their future models as standard, again up to the automaker as to how fancy it actually is.

      In every presentation I've ever seen on this, someone stands up and asks about tracking people. It will either be someone worried about privacy, someone wanting to sell individual tracking information as a commodity, or law enforcement asking about enforcement possibilities. In every case, the designers have said that privacy has been their biggest concern, and that the system as it is currently designed cannot be used for any of this. (I believe that the current method is that a vehicle's transponder ID will get a randomized hash at one location, and then when that hash is seen again, that travel information is recorded, then the hash is dumped and a new random one is generated at that point).

      Note that I said as it is currently designed. There are some good ideas in the program, people just need to keep an eye on it to make sure the usual "backdoors" aren't slipped in for the usual purposes.

  3. Re:Too much computer stuff in cars.. by tindur · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here is more about it.