What C-ITS technologies for national deployment in Australia?

Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) can significantly improve safety and efficiency in road transport by enabling communication between vehicles (V2V), infrastructure (V2I) and other road users (V2X).

This project provides a comparative assessment of C-ITS technologies and their international standards. This is intended to provide Australian governments with a baseline reference report to help inform future decisions in relation to nationally consistent approaches for deployment of C-ITS in Australia.

Participants

• Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts
• La Trobe University

Project background

Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) enables short-range communication and real-time information sharing between vehicles (V2V) and roadside infrastructure (V2I) as well as to other road users such as pedestrians and cyclists (V2X).

The development of C-ITS has the potential to significantly improve road safety and help reduce congestions on roads. However, for greater certainty for vehicle manufacturers bringing vehicles to market in Australia, directions for deployment of C-ITS technology, are needed.

In order to provide these directions, an understanding and evaluation of the main sets of C-ITS technologies and their standards is required. Two key short-range technologies currently competing in the market are DSRC (Dedicated Short-Range Communication), known as ITS G5 in Europe, and C-V2X (Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything).

DSRC is a technology based on the IEEE 802.11p protocol (and the 802.11bd iteration), which are variations of the IEEE 802.11 standard. This technology can realise real-time, accurate and reliable two-way transmission of safety messages and other data within a short range (e.g., 400m), to connect vehicles and roadside infrastructures. DSRC is well established and adopted by several car manufacturers, but standards vary, for instance between Europe and the USA.

An emerging option is C-V2X – LTE-V2X or the 5G variant New Radio (NR) C-V2X. The standards required for C-ITS are progressively being rolled out by 3GPP Release 14-17 (Release 18 is also in development). C-V2X provides one solution for integrated V2V, V2I and V2X by leveraging cellular network infrastructure. C-V2X supports both direct communication over longer distances and communications through cellular base stations, which promises to improve non-line-of-sight performance and provide a high capacity for data transmission. Though relatively new and still largely untested, the promising future roadmap of C-V2X draws significant attention .

These two technologies may be deployed alongside one another, but they are not interoperable, which makes the coexistence of the two technologies very challenging to car manufacturers (vehicle side) and infrastructure developers (roadside). While there have been a number of trials of DSRC and C-V2X and some limited rollouts in Australia and overseas markets, a national approach has not yet been decided with respect to a broad-scale rollout of C-ITS in Australia.

This project will provide the Australian governments with a solid baseline reference report to help inform future decisions in relation to nationally consistent approaches for the deployment of C-ITS in Australia.

Project objectives

Production of a solid baseline reference report to help inform future decisions (either of individual governments or by infrastructure and transport ministers collectively) in relation to nationally consistent approaches for deployment of C-ITS in Australia, this project will:

1. Provide an independent comparison of the two competing short-range technologies, DSRC and C-V2X; clearly specify the information sources and their independency to mitigate the bias of particular technical proponents.
2. Provide a full summary of the standards suites that specify the technologies in key markets such as Europe and the US; and provide an objective assessment of the technologies and identify the larger markets to align with.
3. Engage industry participants – ideally those with objective views – to consult on the pros and cons of the two C-ITS technology options.
4. Produce a plain English, and well-supported report of a maximum of 30 pages that summarises the key considerations with regards to nationally consistent approaches for deployment of C-ITS in Australia.

Final report

This project has been completed. A wrap-up article and a downloadable copy of the final report for the project is available at: DSRC vs C-V2X: Which C-ITS technology for Australia?