An information provision system based on a Multi-Hop RFID scheme for ITS (Intelligent Transportation System)

The information provision systems in ITSs (Intelligent Transportation Systems) currently use licensed bandwidth (e.g, VICS, DSRC), and requires a large-scale client-server system to gather “probe information”. The authors are researching an information provision system based on RFID schemes, aiming to make the system inexpensive to construct. One problem is that the basic RFID technology does not have enough communication distance for this purpose. In this paper, the authors propose an information provision system based on a Multi-Hop RFID scheme in order to overcome this problem. A Multi-Hop RFID scheme also enables information provision systems to provide “probe information” since they can exchange their information with each other at every hop. Since several types of information are to be handled, the proposed system adopts a hybrid transmission method that combines infrequent periodic transmission and transmission at information update. Although some problems still remain, the proposed system is advantageous in several ways. For example, it can provide traffic congestion information in real time without requiring a large server-client system.