DSRC Based Sensor-Pooling Protocol for Connected Vehicles in Future Smart Cities

Smart cities are racing to create a more connected Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that rely on collecting data from every possible sensor such as a smart utility meter or a smart parking meter. The use of more sensors resulted in generating a lot of information that maps the smart city environment conditions to more real time data points that needed to be shared and analyzed among smart city nodes. One possibility, to carry and share the collected data, is in autonomous vehicles systems, which use the Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) technology. For example, in a Car-to-Parking-Meter or a Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications, short-range embedded sensors such as Bluetooth, Cameras, Lidar send the collected data to the vehicle’s Electronic Control Unit (ECU) or to a road side gateway for making collaborative decisions and react to the environment’s surrounding conditions. The goal of this research is to develop and test a DSRC based sensor-pooling protocol for vehicles to cooperatively communicate inclement weather or environment conditions. Five simulation experiments are setup using PreScan and Simulink to validate and study the scalability of the proposed solution. PreScan is an automotive simulation platform that is used for developing and testing Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS). The research findings proved that the DSRC can be used to effectively stream the short range sensors’ collected data over a long distance communications link.