13The Future of Intelligent Transport Systems. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818281-9.00002-
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Chapter 2
Communication advances
2.1 Why vehicular communications?
The main motivation for the development of vehicular communications was and
still is safety, in all its dimensions (vehicle, driver, passenger, pedestrian, and
infrastructure). According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the result
of road accidents worldwide in 2004 was 50 million injuries with 1.2 million of
them being lethal (Peden et al., 2004) and the number increased to 1.4 million
in 2016. This brought road accidents higher in the list of the leading causes of
death in 2018 than in 2000 (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/
the-top-10-causes-of-death). The annual cost of car accidents has been esti-
mated by the American Automobile Association (AAA) to surpass $300 billion
in the United States (Meyer, 2008).
In light of the above, the main challenge of vehicular communications (also
known as “V2X communications”) designers and technicians is to develop sys-
tems that enable intra and intervehicle communication, as well as the communi-
cation with the road network or the power grid infrastructure, with passengers,
pedestrians, and all other involved stakeholders in the vehicular communica-
tion value chain. The idea behind this is, of course, to use this communication
in improving the overall transportation efficiency and eliminate accidents and,
for this purpose, important vehicular communication research efforts take place
nowadays in the United States, Europe, Japan, and China. Fig. 2.1 depicts at a
high-level some solutions provided through vehicular communications.
2.2 Types (modes) of vehicular communications
When the concept of the Internet-of-Things is applied to the automotive indus-
try then the new concept of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) emerges. IoV assumes
that every electronic device onboard of the vehicle is able to communicate (1)
with devices of the road network infrastructure and the power grid (in the case of
electric cars) and (2) the mobile devices of passengers, pedestrians, and cyclists
using mobile internet technology (Ang, Seng, Ijemaru, & Zungeru, 2018). This
transforms vehicles into smart nodes of a city-wide network. The different types
of communication between vehicle devices and all other nodes of the network
are detailed in the following.