Networked assistance systems in road traffic

Driver assistance systems have been increasing road safety for many years and have become a matter of course in many cases. A further increase in road safety will be possible in the future by networking the systems of several vehicles in local proximity. However, this requires highly reliable communication and very short latency times, whereby the transmission between the vehicles involved is often impaired by a lack of line of sight, especially in urban areas.

This can be remedied by exploiting multiple transmission paths via reflections from buildings. By using multiple antenna systems at the transmitter and receiver and suitable signal processing by means of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, spatial diversity can be utilised and reliable transmission with the lowest error rate and short latency can be achieved. However, the development of such systems requires extensive modelling, testing and measurements in real environments.