Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure System (CVIS)
Imagine driving your car, always having up-to-date information about everything from local driving conditions to congestions and alternative routes. In an EU project called CVIS, 60 European companies have now joined forces in order to carry out just this vision.
Congestions, diversions and other traffic problems are an integral part of life for all car drivers. And even though many car radios now receive traffic messages and navigation solutions become increasingly common, traffic flow is still not as fluent as we would like it to be. This not only makes driving tiresome, but also results in increased petrol consumption and more hazardous traffic behaviour. Solving these basic traffic challenges would therefore be beneficial not only to the drivers, but also to the environment and the society in general.
Many of the problems mentioned above could in theory be solved if all cars both had access to information about traffic conditions, weather and speed limits, and could use this information to suggest driving directions. In order to accomplish such a thing, all cars, roads and traffic management centrals must be connected in a wireless and road-wide computer network, a feat that is not entirely trivial. This is however what 60 European companies have planned to accomplish in the EU project CVIS (Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure System). The project has participants from a wide range of transport related sectors, including several car manufacturers (BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Fiat and Renault).
SINTEF’s role in CVIS is to develop a roof-top car antenna that will enable wireless communication between both cars and the road-side base stations. In practise, the antenna solution will be a collection of several different antennas, more specifically GSM/UMTS, WLAN, DSRC (AutoPass) and GPS. Even though several antennas for these standards already exist, they are not optimised for combined use and will thus be less efficient when placed nearby other antennas. The challenge will therefore be to develop an antenna solution which is both compact, aero dynamical and optimal with regard to the various radio solutions.
CVIS (Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure System) is a project aiming at developing and testing technology needed to allow cars to communicate and network directly with the roadside infrastructure.
Contact: Irene Jensen (Beskyttet adresse)
