Proposal of an autonomous group-management model and its application to intelligent transport system

We propose an autonomous group-management model where each node autonomously judges whether to work with other nodes and dynamically forms a group to complete a requested job. This model was developed for mobile systems that consist of mobile terminals and base stations (BSs). The BSs are connected by a network and each BS judges if it should form a group with other BSs based on their physical locations and the type of job without relying on direction from the other BSs. Therefore, each BS is "autonomous". The BSs dynamically form local groups without any centralized manager share information, and complete a job, so this system is well suited to highly distributed systems where high performance is necessary. An intelligent transport system (ITS) is a typical application that matches this model. Various information is provided front BSs to moving cars in an ITS. Such a system will cover a wide area (all of Japan) and will include a huge number of BSs. High performance is required because many cars move at high-speed. We applied our proposed model to a smart gateway (SG) system - one of the ITSs promoted by the Telecommunication Advancement Organization of Japan. We developed a new type of BS according to this model and installed a series of such BSs along roads for our evaluation of the system.