Fault Detection for Vehicular Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

An increasing number of intelligent transportation applications require robust and reliable wireless ad hoc communication. The process of communicating using radio requires a series of software and hardware modules to be functioning correctly. For many vehicle safety and automation applications communication is relied upon to the point where undetected faults can result in potentially dangerous situations, for example if a warning cannot be given in time to prevent a collision. The consequence of problems with any of the network components can be a partial or complete loss of radio communication. Generally, most systems will consider network failure when there is no communication, but this overlooks problems where a partial fault causes degradation in the communication performance. There is a fundamental requirement to detect and respond to the partial failure of a network to ensure that communication is not intermittent, or performs poorly after a certain range. The partial loss of communication is difficult to detect, and is often overlooked in mobile ad hoc network applications. This paper introduces a novel method for modeling the antenna performance using collected data, and using the model to determine the probability that an antenna has some level of performance degradation.