ROADART

Robust, reliable communication between trucks could enable new vehicle applications in order to both greatly improve fuel efficiency and reduce congestion on European roads. The ROADART project aims to improve robustness of wireless communication on hardware, software and also at the application side, as Dr Christos Oikonomopoulos explains

A huge number of trucks and heavy duty vehicles travel on Europe’s roads every day of the year, carrying enormous volumes of goods and products to destinations across the continent. Effective communication between these trucks could help improve road transport efficiency and reduce congestion, a prime motivation behind the work of the ROADART project. “The main objective of ROADART is to investigate and optimise Intelligent Transport System (ITS) communication units with respect to their use in trucks. We are focusing on truckto-truck (T2T), and truck-to-infrastructure (T2I) communications,” outlines Dr Christos Oikonomopoulos, the project’s Principal Investigator. While communication technologies are in general widely used in cars, the size of truck-trailer combinations means that new architecture concepts are required for trucks and heavy duty vehicles. “We aim to develop and evaluate new architecture concepts, in order to ensure a sufficient quality of service for trucks and heavyduty vehicles,” continues Dr Oikonomopoulos.

The key objective here is to make the wireless communication system for T2T/ T2I services more robust and reliable. “We are developing new components for these communication systems,” explains Dr Oikonomopoulos. This work is built on research across a number of areas of ICT, including measurement campaigns to investigate a variety of radio channels as well as CACC (Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control) applications. “ROADART will create a large database of available wireless signal propagation measurements, for various antenna positions. This database can be used as a tool and a reference point for a range of innovative actions on vehicular communications and especially T2T links,” says Dr Oikonomopoulos. “The measurement campaigns will be used to define scientifically and experimentally verified radio channel models suitable for T2T and T2I communications. Full reports and analysis on channel behavior and quality parameters for the specific channels will be extracted.”

This will help lay the foundations for the project’s work in developing robust and reliable new architecture concepts. One major area of research is the development of distributed multiantennae systems. “For example, the large dimensions of a truck and its trailer mean that if you have an antenna on the roof of the driver’s cabin it may not be sufficient to cover the rear of the truck,” points out Dr Oikonomopoulos. This means it is necessary to look for alternative positions for the antenna. “Distributed antennae systems are not located just in one place – they could be located in side mirrors for example,” continues Dr Oikonomopoulos. “Other architectural concepts are also being considered, including beamswitching and beamforming.”

Improving the robustness of wireless communication with respect to packet loss and latency directly improves the availability of wireless communicationbased applications. Especially in case of safety- and time-critical cooperativedriving applications like CACC, reliability of the inter-vehicle wireless communication is of the essence. It allows for short intervehicle distances, which can lead to a reduction of fuel consumption by 10-20 percent. Nevertheless, to cope with potentially dangerous situations arising from link impairments, it is necessary to improve the robustness of both the communication and the application layer.

While the project is using existing communication standards like WiFi IEEE 802.11p and ITS-G5, Dr Oikonomopoulos says this is not sufficient in terms of the project’s wider goals. “There are not enough existing standards, so we need to supplement them, using for example diversity or MIMO techniques in order to improve communication,” he says. A key priority in this area is improving reliability. “Diversity or co-operative techniques are important aspects of the project, where we try to combine more than one communication technique to improve the performance,” outlines Dr Oikonomopoulos.

The project’s research agenda also includes developing novel radio channel models for T2T and T2I communication. These channel models are effectively realistic representations of traffic environments, which provide a framework to investigate certain scenarios. “We have defined critical scenarios, like trucks driving into long distance tunnels. We will perform some measurements in certain test environments, and we will try to model them,” explains Dr Oikonomopoulos. This research holds important implication for several different traffic scenarios in the project. “The T2T scenario in critical environments like a long range tunnel is one aspect of ROADART. We are also looking at different applications and use cases like crossroad and suburban/rural environment scenarios,” says Dr Oikonomopoulos.

Researchers aim to investigate and optimise ITS communication units with respect to these specific applications. A number of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have been defined within the project, setting out the technical targets for the research activities, including beamforming gain, reliability and availability. “The reliability indicator relates to the required Bit Error Rate (BER) for uncoded transmission in order to establish a reliable link for a given coverage area. We set this value of BER at 10-3, meaning an error rate of one bit in every thousand bits,” explains Dr Oikonomopoulos. “A low Packet Error Rate (PER) ensures that information becomes available at the receiver. We expect an improvement of the throughput due to diversity/multi-antenna techniques over existing ITS G5 standard (of about 10-20 percent) and with IEEE 802.11p standard modifications of about 30-50 percent.”

the way trucks are driven on motorways, an issue which Dr Oikonomopoulos and his colleagues plan to investigate in the project. “A demonstration goal of the project is to show reliable and robust T2T communication by means of using CACC in trucks. The first truck will be the leading truck, then behind there will be more trucks following using the CACC application,” he outlines.

This approach could help both reduce the environmental impact of trucks and heavy duty vehicles and also improve the efficiency of European roads. Effective communication will also help trucks find the best possible route in situations where other modes of communication may not be available, such as in tunnels. “You can transmit information about traffic jams, accidents, or roadworks in real-time, so the truck driver can change their route and not worsen traffic congestion,” points out Dr Oikonomopoulos. Researchers are looking at

There are also further potential use cases for these communication units outside those that have already been identified. This will form an important part of Dr Oikonomopoulos’s future research agenda. “We think that some architecture concepts will be unique to some use cases, or can be matched to the current situation. We will try to identify more use cases, and to determine which concepts should be investigated further,” he says. The architecture concepts that have been developed so far will be able to cope with changing traffic levels, and will provide a solid foundation for continued research. “It is our hope that the concepts we envisage realising within the ROADART project will not need further work for optimisation, since they can be deployed regardless of the amount of vehicles on the road. They would be scalable and could operate even in heavy traffic situations,” says Dr Oikonomopoulos.

Research On Alternative Diversity Aspects foR Trucks (ROADART)

ROADART focuses in the investigation of ITS communication units integrated into trucks that assure a sufficient Quality of Service (QoS). At the end of ROADART a demonstration under critical conditions in a real environment (highway, tunnels) as well as platooning of several trucks driving close behind each other is envisaged.

Funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 636565.

• IMST GmbH • MAN Truck & Bus AG • TNO NL • University of Piraeus

Dr Christos Oikonomopoulos-Zachos IMST GmbH Antennas & EM Modelling Carl-Friedrich-Gauss-Str. 2-4 47475 Kamp-Lintfort T: +49-(0)2842-981-371 E: oikonomopoulos@imst.de W: www.roadart.eu W: www.imst.de

Dr Christos Oikonomopoulos-Zachos

Dr Christos Oikonomopoulos-Zachos studied Electrical Engineering at the RWTH Aachen University, Germany, (Dipl.-Ing. 2003, Dr.-Ing. 2010). Since 2009 he is with the department of Antennas and EM Modelling of IMST GmbH, where he is responsible for all automotive antenna activities. He is involved in several automotive projects which include MIMO antenna systems, LTCC technology and mobile communications antennas.