ITS Applications of a Hybrid WiMAX-WLAN Network for Highway Tunnel Scenarios

This paper proposes a scalable prototype surveillance/alarm ITS (Intelligent Transportation System) for roadways safety applications over roadway environments with emphasis given in the wireless vehicular communication inside a tunnel after an emergency event. A heterogeneous hybrid vehicular wireless network consisted of IEEE 802.11b/g/e and IEEE 802.16e is being deployed inside a tunnel environment for traffic safety and surveillance reasons. Extensive measurements throughout a total length of 1km are employed to evaluate the Quality of Service in terms of throughput, packet error rate, SNR, Jitter and packet loss performance over different modulation and code rate schemes. Moreover, we also used the NARDA SRM-3006 to survey wireless channel characterization in terms of large-scale fading investigation for an irregular topology featuring the unlicensed WiMAX 5.745GHz 802.16e channel providing an overview analysis of the in-tunnel wireless communication network.