Developing ITS services for the open safeTRIP platform

The goal of the ongoing SafeTRIP project is to provide the ITS community with a bidirectional communications platform on which any organisation can develop its own ITS and multimedia entertainment applications. This platform is open to developers willing to benefit from a wide range of state-of-the-art satellite communications services (using the recently allocated S-band spectrum for Mobile Satellite Services and based on standards co-developed by several SafeTRIP partners), as well as almost ubiquitous terrestrial communications networks. It is also available to researchers who wish to exploit its flexibility and open standards, as well as its advanced communications capabilities. This paper briefly presents the platform architecture and focuses more specifically on case studies exemplifying the development process for three different applications. It also shows how to capitalise on the enabling functions of the platform to streamline development. Finally, a number of challenges specific to the automotive environment are analysed.