Roadside Units for Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Communication: an Overview

Abstract

Over the past few years, the level of motorization has increased significantly as well as the number of accidents all over the world. Many countries have developed strategies to ensure road safety but the problem remains, and road fatalities keep increasing. Some African countries like Kenya have recently integrated Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) to mitigate the road traffic issues such as congestion, especially in the city of Nairobi. Other countries proposed to implement Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) technology which is a subset of ITS and which seems to be a good solution to reduce road accidents. The implementation of this technology is done by the installation of roadside units (RSUs) on the road network which is said to be very expensive in terms of deployment and operation and maintenance cost. This work aims at presenting the utilization of roadside units for V2I communication. RSUs communicate with vehicles equipped with an onboard unit (OBU) and the communication between the two must be established with quality of service guaranteed. This paper focuses on roadside units functionalities and some related works on their deployment scheme. Keywords—Roadside Unit, Vehicle-to-infrastructure, onboard unit, road safety.