Evaluating the Feasibility of Using Smartphones for ITS Safety Applications

Driving security and comfort can be improved by applying Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) proposals. The low adoption rate of new ITS hardware and software products is slowing down the market introduction of these solutions. In this paper we present a driving safety application for smartphones based on a warning dissemination protocol called eMDR. The use of smartphones minimizes the hardware cost and eliminates most of the adoption barriers; users will no longer have to install new dedicated devices in their vehicles. Instead, they will simply have to install an application in their smartphone. Our application is integrated with a Navigation System which provides access to road maps, current location, and route information. We analyzed the behavior of the wireless channel and the GPS location service under different conditions to assess the feasibility of our proposal. Results showed that, in C2C communications, smartphones are able to provide a reasonable degree of connectivity, and that the degree of precision achieved is enough for certain types of driving safety applications.