Smart sensing and dynamic wireless infrastructure will make smart cities possible. Vehicles can be used as a source of sensing and communications in smart cities. For example, vehicles can provide access to a powerful vehicular network, acting as a mobile base station or relay station. Vehicles can form a network with great sensing, processing and storage capabilities.
Consider the scenario where every vehicle on the road is equipped with a communications mechanism that allows it to connect to other vehicles as well as to the road-side infrastructure. This vehicle can then share information about where it is, where it is going and how fast. Then considering that all this information is shared between the vehicles, then these vehicles can predict, react and even pro-act how they should behave on the road. This would be a great step towards building the smart city, where the utilisation of the road, the pollution and many other problems can be solved. Additionally, considering a network constituted by the vehicles, road sensors in addition to the road-side infrastructure, the energy management for building the network becomes a real challenge.
Given the above background, energy efficient, high-reliability networking and communications is essential for building intelligent transport systems. Hence, this project will focus on the design and analysis of energy-efficient transceivers and networking for the vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure communications. More explicitly, the project will analyse the wireless channel for communications between the vehicles as well as between the vehicles and the infrastructure. Then, suitable transmission and receiver designs will be considered depending on the wireless channel characteristics. Additionally, the project will design and analyse networking techniques in the context of the intelligent transport system, where energy efficiency is considered as one of the objective functions.
The project will first analyse the communications frequencies most suitable for this communications system, then analyse the communications channel in these scenarios, which will results in a mathematical model for the channel. Then suitable transmitter and receiver technologies will be designed and simulated using Matlab, where the reliability will be the main measure of quality. Then, energy efficient networking will be considered in the context of these designs.