Investigation of Multi-Protocol Label Switching for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Intelligent Transportation Systems have many applications, which may be applicable to human safety, traffic management, entertainment and comfort of the users, etc. Most of these applications require better Quality-of-Service provisioning and improved performance by the underlying communication network. Multi-Protocol Label Switching is an efficient and effective technique for forwarding packets along with supporting Quality-of-Service. This work present: an approach that involves integration of Multi-Protocol Label Switching into Intelligent Transportation Systems and investigates its applicability and work-ability in such systems. It would enable harvesting inbuilt capabilities of Multi-Protocol Label Switching in ITS.

I. Introduction

This Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have been receiving a lot of attention globally due to continually growing operational complexity of road-traffic and its management, ever-increasing traffic-volume, and steadily increasing number of vehicles. ITS is often seen as an integrated discipline of controls, computing processing, sensing, automotive electronics, network communications, aimed at multitude of services and applications for traffic management, safety and comfort of the users [1]. It requires underlying communication network with essential support for Quality-of-Service (QoS) provisioning due to involvement of human safety in many applications [2]. ITS-specific network (illustrated in Fig. 1) mainly involves: •

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication: on-road neighbouring vehicles establish interconnection with each-other or one-another for exchange of information. In such a network, vehicles are equipped with wireless mobile routers which are capable of establishing ad hoc connections with each other. Such a device is typically called On-Board Unit (OBU).

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Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication (via Access Point): an on-road vehicle communicates with the road-side access point to share information. In such cases there are road side infrastructural units installed, which servers to create wireless Local Area Network. Such a device is called as Road Side Unit (RSU).

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Intra-Vehicular (IV) communication: various computing devices within a vehicle communicate with each-other.

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Vehicle-to-Device (V2D) communication: handheld or wearable computing system/device of a given driver establishes a connection with vehicle for exchange of information.

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Infrastructural communication: various elements including the front-end as well as back-end devices / nodes communicate with one-another using the infrastructure network / internetwork.