Heterogeneous ITS Architecture for Manned and Unmanned Cars in Suburban Areas

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technology plays a critical role in maintaining road safety, avoiding accidents and controlling traffic flow. As self driving cars are expected to take over the roads, this paper discusses the intermediate phase in which manned and unmanned cars coexist. A heterogeneous network architecture that simultaneously serves manned and unmanned cars' different requirements in a suburban area is proposed and simulated using Riverbed Modeler. The feasibility of this architecture is examined in three different scenarios: Normal operation, congestion in both directions and Road Side Units (RSU) failure. In normal operation mode, traffic data is sent through Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure/Infrastructure-to-Vehicle (V2I/I2V or to RSU) using IEEE 802.11p and infotainment information is communicated as V2I/I2V using Long Term Evolution (LTE). A special case is highlighted and tested, in which congestion is in both directions. In such situation, data needs to be relayed to the nearest RSU using multi-hop communication. A fault-tolerant model is also proposed and analyzed in case of failure of RSU. The performance metrics are end-to-end delay, LTE response time, handover delay and packet loss ratio. The architecture proves its suitability by satisfying traffic control real time application requirements.