Introduction

Transportation is an area where wireless can provide important services. From warning of congestion through to automatically guiding vehicles there are many benefits that wireless could bring. Wireless already plays a substantial role in some sectors – for example, air travel without wireless communications and radar is hard to imagine. But in other areas, such as driving, wireless plays a more limited role of providing radio entertainment and satellite navigation.

Transport is perceived to be one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gases and there is much interest in reducing emissions. Wireless could potentially play a role by making transport systems more efficient.

This chapter looks at each of the key modes of transport and considers the role that wireless might play and the difficulties in its introduction.

Road

Road applications can be divided into

• route guidance,

• safety and

• vehicle telematics.

Route guidance

Many now make use of satellite navigation (satnav) systems to guide them to their destination. Satnav systems are gradually improving via the addition of information about congestion and alternative routing. Such information has been available for some time via dedicated sensors, but more recently some satnav systems have started to report on their speed of movement to a central control location. This can then make deductions about congestion (if many cars on a particular road report a slow speed, this is a strong indication of congestion), which it can then send to other satnav devices in the vicinity, allowing them to route around the congestion.