Road weather station acting as a wireless service hotspot for vehicles

The European Eureka/Celtic Plus project CoMoSeF (Co-operative Mobility Services of the Future) aims to create co-operative mobility solutions (including devices and applications), feasible for large scale deployment. In practice this means combined vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), communication system employing interactive example services related to safety and weather information exchange. In this paper we present FMI (Finnish Meteorological Institute) approach to employ CoMoSef vehicular networking entity by creating a specific service hotspot for vehicles bypassing the combined Road Weather Station (RWS)/Road Side Unit (RSU). Local road weather and route weather (a special type of weather service tailored for dedicated road stretches, constructed both from FMI meteorological systems data and the data collected from local RWSs) are the obvious services offered, but in addition to them there is a variety of services available, from specialized weather data into more general traffic information and local accident warnings. The ultimate aim is to provide data to vehicles regardless of their communication devices available. The supported media at the moment consists of IEEE 802.11p and traditional Wi-Fi communication operated through special vehicle computer, Android-based tablet PC or standard laptop computer, but it is expected to be supplemented at least with iPad- and Jolla-devices, respectively.