GeoNet · Geoaddressing and Georouting for vehicular communications

To increase the road safety in Europe while traffic and driver's concentration demand also rises, the EC and the automotive industry have committed to halve the life loss by 2010. The GeoNet project will significantly contribute to this goal by implementing a reference implementation of a geographic addressing and routing protocol with support for IPv6 to be used to deliver safety messages between cars but also between cars and the roadside infrastructure within a designated destination area.<br/>While the CAR 2 CAR Communication Consortium has invested significant effort into the specification of a car-to-car communications mechanism suitable for safety applications, its mandate does not extend beyond defining a specification. At the same time, ongoing projects like SafeSpot would need an actual implementation to rely on whereas other such as CVIS are developing a communication architecture relying on the maintenance of a constant access to the Internet over IPv6. <br/>GeoNet shall bring the basic results from the work of the CAR 2 CAR Communication Consortium to the next step, by further improving these specifications and creating a baseline software implementation interfacing with IPv6. The goal of GeoNet is thus to implement and formally test a networking mechanism as a standalone software module which can be incorporated into Cooperative Systems. This implementation shall enable transparent IP connectivity between a vehicle and the infrastructure, even in cases when delivery must be hopped over several vehicles or cached along the way. GeoNet not only benefits from previous work within these projects, but also will provide a support for the integration of its solution. This collaboration is sketched in support letters.<br/>Once GeoNet fulfils the existing implementation gap of geo-addressed networking, ongoing and future projects for Cooperative Systems can maintain their focus on architecture design, application development and field trials.