COMBINE: modular system for communication and relative positioning for short-range mobile radio networks

COMBINE, a modular system combining communication, identification, and relative positioning for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication in an IRTE network, is presented. The ability of the COMBINE system to configure the equipment properly to serve just those RTI (road traffic informatics) applications which are of importance to a specific user group makes it highly cost efficient. The functionality of the recently developed communication protocols for the physical layer, the data link layer, and the network layer of the short-range mobile radio network is discussed. The higher-layer protocols are mainly based on widely used standard protocols (ISO/OSI) and cover any services known for computer communication networks. Internetting and gateway protocols support the interconnection between the IRTE network and other public/private networks. Therefore, the proposed COMBINE system satisfies the demands of any communication related RTI application supporting driver information and therefore traffic safety and efficiency