On the Effectiveness of a GPRS based Intelligent Transportation System in a Realistic Scenario

The work deals with the impact evaluation of an intelligent transportation system (ITS) based on the GPRS (general packet radio service) technology to alert vehicles approaching an accident. The last ten years saw an unexpected increasing of wireless communication technologies, first for circuit switching services, then also for packet switching applications. This kind of technologies can now be used not only for communication issues. Here we show the application of the GPRS wireless technology to ITS in a realistic scenario to promptly alert vehicles approaching difficult and unexpected situations such as accidents and queues. The aim of this work is to show the validity of a GPRS radio system on board in order to provide warning services to vehicles near an imminent crash situation on a highway. The great advantage of the proposed solution is the adoption of the well known and spread GPRS infrastructure to improve safety on roads. Numerical results, obtained by means of a simulation tool implementing realistic traffic models, show the great improvement, in term of safety, derived by the use of an embedded alerting system