Some transportation technology

Here Amy Zuckerman describes the application messages that cars and traffic lights use to talk to each other:

Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE)

The technology that would turn a major interstate into a national wireless highway sounds pretty pie-in-the-sky, but it does exist and has passed field tests. At the end of May, standards developer Lee Armstrong (head of Armstrong Consulting in Southampton, MA and principal developer of the WAVE standards) surprised many industry and government officials with the announcement that after almost 19 years of discussion and 13 years of active standards development, the WAVE specs for DSRC are now available to guide the manufacture of this very advanced wireless communication technology.

Although improvements still need to be made, Armstrong says, “Manufacturers can now build transponders—a sort of radio—that can communicate back and forth between the vehicle and the roadside.” Besides the benefits listed above, he added that WAVE-based transponders and roadside readers would provide “the fastest connectivity of any wireless device, so there is hardly any delay to get a signal.”

Industry and government officials are taking great care not to overstate the impact WAVE could have on national and global roadways, because to date there have been no products based on WAVE specs. Yet, there’s no denying that after years of effort and funding for development, officials are pleased with the latest results.

Meanwhile, there are still challenges. For starters, it’s one thing to have specs available to build a product—quite another to have the funding to retool the manufacturing process to make the product. Then, there is the need to fund a pilot deployment of WAVE-based technology that can support the DSRC pipe to carry short-range data transmissions for the connected vehicle (CV), which will allow for vehicle-to-vehicle information transmission of traffic flow and road conditions without human intervention.

At this moment, all that is certain about WAVE and CV deployment is the desire on the part of Department of Transportation (DOT) officials, the global auto industry, global traffic technology vendors, and ITS America (the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group for intelligent transportation systems (ITS)) officials to find an avenue to move ahead on deployment of both WAVE and the CV to make possible the long-awaited dream of safer, cleaner, less expensive highway travel for the U.S. and around the world.

Among those who are closely associated with WAVE, there is an undeniable excitement over the latest advancement. In fact, a key captain of industry who has backed WAVE’s development and is now a Washington, D.C.-based consultant, called WAVE’s publication “very significant.”  He pointed out that there could not be any interoperable DSRC devices that will function nationwide without this basic communication piece.

Some analogies would describe this is a the network layer since it allows multi-hop messages to be passed along. But is might also be the application layer since it allows cars to tell each other what they are doing and where. The WAVE protocol, or some subset of it will evolve and become what the Internet is to the Web.