Telematics applications, long promised, finally appear to be making headway. With the agreement on a telematics wireless standard called Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC), the industry has a solid platform to build on. Although infotainment and intelligent highways were once seen as the main drivers for adoption of telematics, motorist safety and traffic management applications are taking their place. At some point in-vehicle trends will include wireless connectivity providing entertainment and web access. For the foreseeable future however, this will be limited to traffic and safety information broadcast from roadside access points.

Near-term telematics applications will allow cars to warn other vehicles of nearby emergency situations or adverse road conditions ahead. This information can be displayed within onboard navigation systems and roadside messaging boards in real time. Drivers can be altered to severe or congested road conditions and provided alternate routes. This will require, reliable low latency networking between moving vehicles and between vehicles and roadside access points.

Mobility Enabled Access (MEA) technology offers high performance low latency networking solutions that are ideally suited for both near-term and long-term telematics applications. It’s self-forming and self-healing routing and automatic node discovery allow mesh-enabled vehicles to form instant vehicle-to-vehicle (i.e. peer-to-peer) ad hoc networks and communicate among themselves. Furthermore, Motorola’s Multi-Hopping™ routing turns every vehicle into a router /repeater, improving network coverage, reliability and throughput. This enables messages to "hop" though other vehicles. This works to increase end-to-end communications range and enables information to quickly reach all effected vehicles. Unlike other ad hoc solutions, MEA technology is highly scalable, supporting dozens, even hundreds of cars per ad hoc group at any given time.

Continuous Meshing™ capabilities are another unique and important feature of MEA networking. It supports seamless networking of roadside infrastructure and mobile ad hoc clusters of vehicles. Mobile nodes, cars in this case, can move seamlessly between infrastructure-based and vehicle-based peer-to-peer networks. This is essential for instant association and disassociation with roadside access points and other mesh-enabled highway infrastructure such as variable message signs or sensors.

MEA technology can also add position location determination to select radio platforms. Both absolute (geo-referenced coordinates) as well as relative (distance from other nodes) position can be determined and displayed. This information is available in real time to each user, as well as to a network operations center. These position location capabilities are currently deployed using Motorola’s QDMA® mobile radio.

Applications

• Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications
• Automated Road Hazard Warning Systems
• Roadside Information Networks
• Infotainment and Mobile Internet Access

For additional features and benefits of MOTOMESH solutions for telematics applications click here.