Title: Fail silence mechanism for dependable vehicular communications

Authors: João Almeida; Joaquim Ferreira; Arnaldo S. R. Oliveira

Addresses: Instituto de Telecomunicações, DETI – University of Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal ' Instituto de Telecomunicações, ESTGA – University of Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal ' Instituto de Telecomunicações, DETI – University of Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal

Abstract: This paper presents a fault-tolerant architecture to improve the dependability of infrastructure-based vehicular networks. For that purpose, a fail silence enforcement mechanism for road-side units (RSUs) was designed, implemented and tested. Vehicular communications based on IEEE 802.11p are inherently non-deterministic. The presence of RSUs and a backhauling network, adds a degree of determinism that is useful to enforce real-time and dependability, both by providing global knowledge and by supporting the operation of collision-free deterministic MAC protocols. One of such protocols is V-FTT, for which the proposed mechanism was designed as a case study. Notice, however that this mechanism is protocol independent and can be adapted to any wireless communications system. The proposed technique is capable of validating a frame for transmission by identifying faults both in value and time domains. Experimental results show that the fail silence enforcement mechanism has low latency and consumes few FPGA resources.

Keywords: fail silence mechanism; fault tolerant architecture; vehicular networks; dependable wireless communications; intelligent transportation systems; ITS.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2017.087471

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2017 Vol.10 No.6, pp.534 - 545

Received: 19 Sep 2015
Accepted: 20 Feb 2016
Published online: 16 Oct 2017 *

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