Requirements for the Physical Layer of the NOTICE System for Vehicular Communications

In this paper we investigate physical layer requirements for the NOTICE system proposed for notification of traffic incidents. The system uses short-range wireless communication between vehicles and sensor belts embedded in the roadway which impose constraints on time available for connection and data exchange, and we study the probabilities of establishing the wireless link and of successfully exchanging information between a sensor belt and a vehicle passing over it. We derive analytical expressions for these probabilities as functions of several parameters such as the time available for handshaking/information exchange, average speed of the vehicle, data rate and amount of information to be exchanged between vehicle and belt, and we evaluate their values for specific parameters corresponding to practical scenarios. Our numerical results indicate that inexpensive short-range wireless systems such as ZigBee radios are good candidates for the physical layer of the NOTICE system.