Fault detection for vehicular ad-hoc wireless networks

An increasing number of intelligent transportation applications require robust and reliable wireless communication. To achieve the required quality of service it is necessary to implement redundancy in the critical path which includes the radio software and hardware. In a real-world application there are many things that can cause the communication between two vehicles to degrade or stop completely. This paper describes a novel technique for detecting degradation or failure of communication links by comparing the performance of the radios to a probabilistic model built using data collected in the field. The results show that this techinique can successfully detect when there is partial or complete failure to communicate due to damage to the external components such as antennas, connectors and cables.