Page 17 - TrafficInfraTech Dec-Jan 2019

ITS

The debate regarding IoT and ITS agencies like a hospital or to a patient e.g. Health Domain, Industrial Domain,
have been going on for ages. IoT and who needs to be carried to a hospital. Home Appliances Domain and Power
ITS have largely evolved as two separate Such information is going to be very Sector etc. Similarly, in ITS, when you
streams within both standards and useful in deciding as to whether to take look at IEEE and ISO standards, you
industry initiatives. Today, as most of the route or take an alternate one. The will get hundreds of standards but
the cars have sensors, microcomputers information will also be passed on to those are mostly application specific.
and communication devices fitted into the traffic police department whether We are not going to touch upon those
them, IoT has become deeply rooted to divert the traffic from that area to standards here because the objective
in ITS – in particular cooperative and some other area. is to homogenise all the verticals
connected automated mobility – to When we talk about standardisation together, and not about any specific
give vehicles a complete perception of of IoT, we talk about standardising the application use case. These application
their environment. communication aspects of it and when use cases should mostly be reusable in
Generally speaking, as IoT is basically we talk about the communication, we the same fashion using a standardised
a collection of many sensors and mostly talk about the distal IoT part of it. communication mechanism.
actuators with some logic associated Reusability of resources is emerging Most of the current implementations
with that, it is trying to bring in as the cornerstone of modern IoT of IoT/M2M applications (including
intelligence into this whole ecosystem. systems. The data generated by the Vehicle-to-Infrastructure kind of ITS
There are two aspects to IoT: one is a sensors of one entity is going to be applications) are very siloed where the
proximal and other is a distal IoT. used and it must be re-used to really data is predominantly generated by
Proximal IoT supports communication make sense in this ecosystem. This using some sensors which connect to
among devices in close proximity with has to be done with proper security some controller(usually referred to as
functionality targeting fields such as framework implemented into this. gateways) using some PAN(personal
smart homes and buildings and vehicle- ITS is instantiation of IoT, all area network) protocol like ZigBee,
to-vehicle communications. Here devices applications are generated out of Z-Wave, LoRa, Bluetooth, BLE, Wi-Fi
often discover each other using multicast information which is given by the (or even wired connection) etc. and
or broadcast capabilities and then sensors and sensors means IoT. then communicate to the server
exchange data directly. While IoT generates data, some data having the business application.
consumption and taking decision- The network used between such
Distal functionality targets larger-scale gateway(s) and the server(s) is a WAN
IoT deployments, basically connecting making based on that data is an connectivity medium, which is used
instantiation of the IoT. For example,
proximal IoT islands to the Internet.
a vehicle tries to sense a pothole; now merely as a means of transport...
When a person trying to cross the while it senses a pothole, it takes a The business application in the server
street and the car automatically applies decision to apply brakes, that is proximal not only has to know about the data
brakes, that is proximal IoT. A car IoT. But when it communicates to a model of the sensors, but also has to
senses something within it and taking service provider and thereby the other understand the PAN protocols as well.
an action inside, that is what we call vehicles get to know that there is a When ITS had just started taking
proximal decision-making. pothole and that is likely to cause some shape, the premier car manufacturers
But when a car senses something accidents on this particular road then like the BMW, Mercedes etc. used
and another car wants to benefit from that becomes a distal IoT. And that is a lot of sensors in their vehicles. The
that information that is a distal IoT where we would like to standardise this data generated by these sensors were
because that will have to be sent across communication link. transported to their respective factories
to a central intelligence decision-making Now when we say standardisation, in a very proprietary manner. The
entity to be able to communicate there have been ample number of communication was generally done
further to either a single car or a set standards in the connected vehicles using GSM network in international
of cars. Now while it applies to cars, paradigm. For example, the 5.9Ghz roaming. There was no provision to
it is also applied to other verticals like 172 Channel crash imminent safety share this data and therefore other
Adaptive Signal Control. For instances, standards have been there since ages. applications could not get the benefit
when a car breaks down, there is a Now this is between vehicle-to-vehicle, of this huge data generated. Data
huge traffic at a signal. In such case, this and many such similar standards exist sharing is important and the users get
information must be notified to several in every vertical domain in every area enormously benefitted.

www.trafficinfratech-com-500653.hostingersite.com December ’18 - January ’19 / TrafficInfraTech 17