Simplifying the in-vehicle connectivity for ITS applications

In-vehicle connectivity has experienced a big expansion in recent years; car manufacturers are very active in this sense, and are proposing OBU oriented solutions. This effort is justified by the user demands for always-on connectivity. However, currently available OBUs do not provide the desired flexibility and simplicity of use that would be desirable for ITS applications. For example, none of them considers the possibility for inter-vehicle device-to-device communications. In this paper we present GRCBox, an architecture that ex- tends the in-vehicle connectivity by providing inter and in- vehicular communication support. By creating private vehicular networks, GRCBox allows user devices’ applications to perform direct peer-to-peer communication. In this paper we describe the GRCBox design along with four case studies. We also include the experimental results obtained from a test-bed to show that our solution does not have a negative impact on the performance when compared to a centralized solution.