Development of an ITS-G5 Road Side Unit for Intelligent Transportation Systems

The quest for smarter, safer and more efficient mobility requires the use of information and communication technologies to collect and exchange data between vehicles for the realization of so called intelligent transportation systems. Wireless technologies play a crucial role within this process. However, without any communication infrastructure supporting data exchange over large distances, the effective realization of an intelligent transportation system is almost impossible. At the current state of the art, though, such an infrastructure is de facto not available. In this paper, it is proposed to use the existing cables connecting the SOS telephones on the highways road side as backbone communication infrastructure for the realization of intelligent transportation systems. A new piece of hardware to convert the current emergency phones into fully functional ITS-G5 road side units is developed and presented here. Preliminary tests under real environmental conditions show the effectiveness of the developed solution in successfully extending the existing SOS telephone infrastructure into an intelligent transportation system.