Supporting real-time data traffic in safety-critical vehicle-to-infrastructure communication

Support for real-time traffic is crucial to many ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) safety applications. At the same time it is desirable to provide a number of non-safety services. In this paper, we propose a communication system for safety-critical V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) communication based on an extension to the upcoming IEEE 802.11p MAC standard. Real-time analysis provides the tool to adapt the resources set aside for collision-free, safety-critical data traffic to the communication needs of the current number of supported vehicles. The remaining bandwidth is available to other services according to the contention-based random access method defined in the standard. The performance of the proposed concept is evaluated through a simulation analysis based on a merge assistance scenario supported by roadside infrastructure.