Vehicular Communications

Abstract

Traditionally, vehicles were seen as isolated elements within the road environment. With technological progress in sensors and communications, it has been possible to increase the scenario awareness of all the road actors. This has led to the consolidation of the set of services and systems that is the concept of Cooperative ITS and Cooperative Autonomous Driving. Vehicular communications provide connectivity in scenarios requiring mobility, in a Vehicle-to-Anything (V2X) framework. This requires addressing different issues, from the connection of a vehicle sensor to the immediate road receiver, to the exchange of service data between an embarked smartphone and a remote service provider. However, as the technologies evolved, and started being deployed, aspects such as integration and interoperability, and the related mechanisms of standardization, certification, and homologation gained importance. Both the technologies and the standardization at European and international level are briefly described in this chapter.