Challenges for cooperative ITS: Improving road safety through the integration of wireless communications, control, and positioning

For intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to achieve situational awareness beyond their sensing horizon and to harness coordination capabilities, some form of cooperation will be required. Such cooperation is enabled by vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure wireless communication. The integration between the communication, signal processing, and control sub-systems is non-trivial and requires a co-design, which in turn requires collaboration between these three disciplines. This paper presents a possible evolution of these three disciplines within the context of ITS, as well as several challenges and opportunities.