Experimental evaluation of a novel vehicular communication paradigm based on cellular networks

In the field of vehicular networks, the amount of telematic services which are usually taken into account is very limited. Safety services, and specifically collision avoidance applications, practically receive an exclusive attention. Due to vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are the most used communication technology, services conceived for the vehicle domain are frequently designed to take advantage of its benefits, but also to suffer its limitations. The intention of this paper is proposing a novel communication paradigm open to the development of any vehicular service with connectivity requirements. This way, not only vehicle to vehicle (V2V) necessities are considered, but also vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) connections are taken into account with the same importance. The work presented here chooses the cellular networks as a valid alternative to VANET approaches in most of the cases, with the added value of V2I capabilities. A design based on peer to peer (P2P) networks has been implemented and tested over a real environment. The hardware/software prototype is explained and main performance measurements prove our system is a feasible communication paradigm for most of vehicular services.