Smart City Challenge Information Session 8 Transcript
Understanding Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC)
At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. (Operator instructions) this conference is being recorded I would now like to turn the call over to Brian Cronin, please go ahead.
Inc. you very much and good morning or afternoon everyone welcome to the Beyond Traffic - The Smart City Challenge . Joined by welfare also the IST program office in Toronto guard from her office of acquisitions [Indiscernible - low volume] we are excited today to perform a information session of this one will be a dive into one particular aspect that we felt was going to be important for people to have more knowledge on. 10 eight. Before I get -- Information Session 8 - Understanding Dedicated Short Range Communications it looks like folks are using the chalkboard to identify where they are from and feel free to continue to do so and something that started a few sessions ago and provides great information for folks to understand who is interested in the challenge.
As I have been doing providing great overviews and get a little tired of it but you never know who is new of the webinars so we are trying to look and get the best and most creative ideas for addressing challenges you are facing. The Smart city challenge will address emerging transportation data technologies and applications and can be integrated with existing system to address challenges. Looking to demonstrate how we can bring the best data and intelligent transportation system technology and applications to reduce congestion and keep travelers safe and protect environment and respond to climate change while connecting underserved communities and supporting economic vitality. We're coming rapidly to the first face deadline of February for 40 proposals, for high-level vision proposals. February 4. We will select up to five We will select up to 543 challenges and provide $100,000 each.
Shortly thereafter we will move into competition for those sites. We will be providing $40 million from the US DOT, $10 million from the Balkan foundation and equipment solution for mobile I'd shield on every bus in the city. Selected.
This is high-level summary of the schedule of the application is due in February and moving onto the next phase and intend to announce winners of the first phase SXSW. And then in May -- month of May we will have analyst for the Federalist [Indiscernible - static] we -- weight expect to announce the Smart city challenge winner in May.
To set the content of the DSR see discussion we have these 12 vision elements for the Smart city challenge obviously dedicated short-range medication has been a critical part of our fieldwork but you can see it throughout most of these session elements and can be used to support various strategies in the user focus mobility, related to deliver logistics and communications method to allow us to bring any data to support urban analytics and also part of connected automation and throughout these different vision elements.
With that I will turn it over to welfare to walk you through the details of dedicated short-range communications.
Thank you Brian and welcome everyone to our session.
We intended to have this session because again dedicated short-range communication DSRC is very important element and resource that we would like people to make use of as they contemplate using this connected intelligent transportation system to improve condition and their particular area.
As we have gone and engaging people in Smart cities area we find a number of people are not very familiar with this particular communication medium. Even though those who may have initial familiarity with the communication medium may not completely understand its full capability. What we want to do here in possession is help people understand more about the history of DSRC and eventually where the hits into the larger system that we expect to be in place in order to accomplish the goals of any particular project.
First I will touch a little bit on what our view of the entire system is. And then touch on some of the resources that are available particularly in communication oriented resources that people will have available to them to accomplish their transportation oriented goals and then focus on where DSRC in. By the end of the session today you will have a better appreciation for this communication medium that is unique to transportation and hopefully it will help you fill in some of the details in your vision so that you have understanding of how eventually whenever you have as part of your vision will become part of these very large scales uniform implementations we transportation are familiar with.
To step back a little bit, transportation is a very rich history of doing immensely large implementations of very uniform, very ubiquitous kinds of things that help people safely and efficiently go about their transportation activities.
You may not think about it on a daily basis trillions of units of data are delivered to transportation participants and it is done in such a way that everyone who encounters those units of data have opportunity for common experiences. Step back for a second and think about your drive to the office this morning or activities with your family last night and how many times when you are out and about whether walking or driving or on a bus, is see that familiar red octagon stop sign. I don't even have to ask where you are because I know wherever you are you will have seen that numerous times in every transportation related activity that you participate in.
That is an example of a very uniform, very ubiquitously available unit of data that helps every transportation participant safely and efficiently go about their activities and that is what we would like to have people have in the back of their mind as we move toward this communication intensive rather than physical device intensive types of implementations.
What in your vision idea has that element that needs to be uniformly deployed, ubiquitously available like a red octagon stops like? Anywhere you go in continental United States or North America, you see the red octagon stops I. It may have different word in the middle of it instantly recognizable from anywhere, from anybody who is probably older than five or six years old to everyone else, everybody understands it so we are looking for elements and systems like this that can be reaching that level of deployment.
We are looking for something that is bigger than just something in a city.
In order to help people accomplish that, we have created a reference architecture, we have started to work on consensus definitions for these data units that will enable a tremendous amount of activities that we would like to have placed and then once we have these elements that give us opportunity for a common experience everywhere, we also have the ability to do the unique kinds of value added activities that people would like to include in their overall vision.
Into start to draw out a physical view of all of the profits that make up connected intelligent transportation system it starts to become a very confusing, very rich set of elements and objects that make up a system like this.
We found it helps to have a much more disciplined way of organizing your concept in being able to communicate that with people on an engineering level.
One of the first steps toward coming up with these uniform implementations is coming up with a uniform way of describing them and that leads us to something that we refer to as our reference architecture. What you see here on this particular view is a version of the image you saw in the last screen but drawn in such a way it makes a lot more sense to the discipline or the engineering disciplines that will need to be in place in order to build these things. We have created this reference architecture to help people come up with these uniform implementations and our view of a complete connected intelligent transportation system contains all of the objects that make up such a system.
You see things in the upper right-hand corner in the color blue which are things that exist in vehicles, things in the lower right-hand corner in yellow which are the gadgets that people carry with them as they take part in transportation activities. You see things in orange in the middle that represent objects that exist at the boundary between mobile and fixed parts of a system like this and typically exist at the site of the road and further to the left you start to see things in a green color that represent the objects that host application content out in the Internet somewhere.
All of these things are then connected by various information flows that are supported by communication medium. Started to work our way towards this topic of DSRC because if you look at the objects in the right-hand side toward the upper right-hand side, you see there is a lot of interaction between the vehicles themselves and vehicles and equipment that sets at the side of the road.
You need a particular communication medium in order to support that kind of activity and. At the same time you need to make sure there is a lot of other system level user needs taken into account.
One of the things that we would like to have all of the information flows that support the communication among those objects have well understood common processes for these information flows. That allows different parties to create the objects, the objects can then come together and go apart just as they normally do in transportation activities and the system will work.
One of the other things that is important to us is when we define these common processes for these information flows, we preserve this principle of privacy by design. That is one of the things important to us and a lot of people involved in transportation activities, is that they are able to go about their activities with the relative level of privacy. We have designed specific aspects of DSRC to accommodate that particular user needs.
We know there is a tremendous amount of data that needs to move in the system like this. Is called into play a number of different communication media in order to accomplish that kind of data movement.
One of the other realizations we have come to in analyzing overall complex system that sits behind connected intelligent transportation system is that there are two types of data out there. There is the type of data like the red octagon stop that should be available to everyone and should be able to be provided by any competent practitioner. If you think about transportation in North America there is probably tens of not hundreds of thousands of different practitioners that know how to procure and install those red octagon stop sign. And anybody who is going about transportation activities has the benefit of that data unit. It does not depend on a particular brand of vehicle they are driving or a particular subscription that they pay for or a particular application object that they may have, they are able to get the benefit of the data unit, very important aspect of the movement of data we are interested in and something that is very much facilitated by this medication medium, DSRC, is one of the things that influence the design of it.
Also a significant amount of data that moves in a transportation system like this is for private or commercial or enforcement type of purposes. Typical peer-to-peer data exchanges that we are very familiar with in the Internet context take place in a transportation system as well. This is kind of our unique view of the movement of data in a system like this, communication media that are needed in order to support the movement of those two very unique different types of data.
We know multiple communication media will be needed in order to accomplish something as grand of the scale is what we have in mind. We have this medium DSRC that we make use of very heavily and we have a number of other very established wireless meaty that also -- media that can also be used for this purpose.
We know Internet protocol transport media are going to form a critical part of the overall implementations of this.
In order to help people make sure they come up with these beginnings of these uniform implementations, we are working on a number of tools that are available and will be made available to any project teams to help them fully described and document and articulate to all the rest of the people who are observing this, all of their details of their implementation.
Just to give you an idea of the resources that you have available to you as you think about how you would implement particular vision in your particular city, any one of these types of communication media will be at your disposal. You have certain communication media that have almost continent wide reach and there are several different types of media that give you that kind of ability and we have worked in the use of that particular type of medium into our overall reference architecture concept.
We also have the ability to use wide area network type of communications, average were run-of-the-mill cellular installations will be very important part of your overall data distribution and movement concept that is part of your project.
You also have this unique DSRC medium available to you. I will be getting into more details of that but it is something that has been specifically engineered to work well in the moving vehicle context and has been specifically engineered to help with the movement of those two types of data. There is the very ubiquitous, very uniformly created type of data that everyone should be able to produce everyone should have access to. And then it also supports peer-to-peer type of data exchanges that are also very important in a system like this. And then as you zero in on the kind of geographic scale of these types of media you have other familiar transport type of media like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth that could be used on a very small geographic scale to complement these larger range types of medium.
What we are expecting is that people will take advantage of all of these resources that they have available to them and will come up with creative ways of mixing them together and make use of all of these assets that are at your disposal.
With that I will dive in into the topic of DSRC. Dedicated short-range communications because it might going about smart city world I find people that have come in from outside of transportation area may not have never even heard of DSRC let alone thought about how it might support their vision concept that they are working on.
We wanted to give you an idea of a little bit more about what it is and how it might fit into that particular scheme of things.
DSRC is a low latency Wi-Fi like medium that has been very specifically adapted for the vehicle environment.'s origins come from IEEE 802 type of packet-based communication medium and is a derivative of 802.11 the familiar foundation for the Wi-Fi but a lot of the baggage of wireless local area networks has been dispensed with in order to come up with very low latency type of characteristics that make that make the SRC uniquely useful.
The Secretary originally gave practitioners in this area a spectrum allocation that is in the upper five a spectrum allocation that is in the upper 5 GHz band in order to have a unique place to operate this particular medium.
At the time the allegations were made the thoughtless this would be a significant factor in the improvement in the safe and efficient operation of transportation system and as such it should have a medium to operate in that will give the highest likelihood of success in those kinds of safety and mobility and efficiency improvements.
Since 1999 allocation has been revised lightly and further actions by the Secretary, and we have arrived at a point where we have a fairly stable definition for this particular communication medium. And we are now in the process of exercising that in a number of large-scale deployment projects, we are expecting it will become something very useful to anybody putting together one of these smart that he challenge proposals.
-- Smart city challenge proposals.
Some of the unique aspects of DSRC that make it different than other white packet-based medium is that it has unique broadcast mode. Something very rare in a packet-based type of 802 based medium.
But it becomes because it has that broadcast mode it becomes a very efficient way of distributing those uniform ubiquitous data units. We envision every vehicle operating out there will be sharing vehicle status information with all of the other vehicles immediately around it so that they can implement crash avoidance strategies. Likewise equipment at the side of the road like signalized intersections will be distributing these very uniformly defined data units so that people can more safely and efficiently negotiate their way through those controlled intersections and that takes advantage of this broadcast mode that this particular medium has and as far as we know there is no other modern packet-based communication medium that is widely available right now that have this broadcast mode.
It also has been formulated to support peer-to-peer IP transport based kind of data exchanges as well. At all of the medium is taken up, by the use of those cash flow data distributions so the capacity of the medium is also available to do these peer-to-peer data exchanges and these are the familiar packet exchanges that you would use to support a specific application object running in a specific mobile device, interacting with its corresponding application object in a back office somewhere back in the Internet. All Internet protocol-based but again this wireless medium was designed to work well in the situation where one of the communicating partners is a moving vehicle. Think about that for a second. The only other medium that you have to use of that particular case is wide area network cellular.
And we know that wide area network cellular is extremely crowded so the about this as another way of getting additional communication capacity that will be needed to support all of those peer-to-peer data exchange activities.
The last thing I need to keep reiterating is that this medium was engineered specifically to help with preserving privacy of individuals as they go about their transportation activities.
Privacy has always been an afterthought in other contexts that was a primary thought in the development and refinement of this particular communication medium and the data that carries along with it.
Again stepping even further into the details of DSRC as I mentioned earlier it exists in a spectrum allocation in upper 5 GHz band. For those of you familiar with 5 GHz band you may be familiar with units three allocation that is in what people call a 5.8 band and that is immediately below this.
If you walk of the 5 GHz band, and you get the 5850, you begin to get into the DSRC allocation. Because all the way up to 15 925. Within that allocation there have been seven channels that have been designated that are 10 MHz wide.
If you are familiar with the defining elements in a 02.3 and 802.11, you understand the packet major of the communication that takes place there. And the channels and the modulation schemes and all of the other channel access methods that are part of things that are of the Wi-Fi family. DSRC is not Wi-Fi but it comes from the same parentage.
It is based on the medium is based on definitions in the IEEE 802 family and additional network layer and cryptic process processes are given [Indiscernible - low volume] family of standards.
Payload definitions particularly those related to the area uniform, very big to sleep data units that we think will be a very important part of anybody's transportation concept are defined in the family of SAE standards.
DSRC springs from the same roots as ethernet and Wi-Fi, has been specifically engineered to work well in a moving vehicle environment, it has had features added to it that give you the ability to help protect privacy and it supports this kind of broadcast mode distribution and general IP transport but it is not the same kind of general IP transport that you might encounter in other media. There are definitely policies in place that assert certain priorities for certain types of activities and again, in order to give access to all of the users there are certain limitations on packet sizes and some of the other aspect of the medium.
It becomes a very useful medium and the moving vehicle context, and has been specifically engineered to meet the needs of stakeholder communities who are most interested in transportation activities.
Just to reiterate again, for those not familiar with DSRC, it was created as a means of enabling vehicular safety applications. That has been extended considerably since that original origin of the ability to support the safety applications has been maintained at the highest priority.
Those will always have the capacity they need in this medium in order to accomplish those safety improvements. Whenever his left of the capacity is available to be used for those other purposes, other kinds of efficiency and environment improvement ideas that people have. As well as all of the maintenance and management and enforcement and commercial activities that people would like to among moving vehicles.
Again, it has been specifically designed to help with this huge set of use cases that involved a moving vehicle so that means you need to have ability to do fast network accesses. Inc. about a moving vehicle going past a fixed gateway device. It has to have this low latency in order to accomplish these crash avoidance types of things. That has to be tremendous amount of data exchange with very little time delay in that so that people can come up with effective crash avoidance strategies.
High reliability is required, talking about safety improvement, the availability and ability to use that everywhere is very important.
If you think about how transportation systems are built, you never know who is going to be involved in it so it becomes even more important that all of the components within it are interoperable. That is another one of the big aspects of this particular medium. And something that is driving the deployment of it among all of the user communities.
Security and privacy are very important to the transportation community. Specific elements of DSRC have been designed to support the kinds of security processes that are needed in these highly cooperative types of transportation activities and again, preserving privacy by design rather than by afterthought is something that is extremely important to us.
For those that have not seen the implementations of this, there are a number of people who are working on physical objects that host application components that make use of this kind of a medium. There has been a tremendous number of people who have built prototype level and are starting to announce production versions of aftermarket style devices that can be used in moving vehicles.
It is a matter of just doing simple Google search and you will start to find people making product announcements in this area.
It is becoming very much available and we are looking forward to seeing the created aftermarket style devices that support that at as big of aspect of vehicles and as we wait for our friends in the automotive original equipment manufacturer site, start to design in equipment that make use of this communication medium.
Likewise there is a number of people working on the gateway types of devices that would be at the side of the road. Again, it will be important that there are a large number of these devices available and very prodigiously deployed. It has been -- ubiquitously deployed. Has been estimated that the deployment of DSRC medium in order to support activities we are interested in including Internet protocol transport will require density of these roadside gateway type devices in the order of 5-10-20 per square kilometer depending on terrain and other environmental factors.
There is a robust group of suppliers out there working on that side of the wireless medium. So we expect when people get to the point where they are going to be constructing one of these smart city projects they will have a variety of these commercially available equipment sets in order to accomplish this particular communication medium within the overall implementation.
Parsing into DSRC again to relate some of its fundamentals and how we make use of that entire spectrum allocation, useful to think of DSRC as having 4 fundamental parts. Those four parts serve significant clusters of use cases within the overall application of this communication medium.
You can see as I highlight a quarter of the overall project, physical view here, the part particularly among vehicles and among vehicles and equipment at the side of the road. A lot of us are very familiar with crash avoidance things that people have been doing particularly large-scale installation accomplished in Ann Arbor Michigan that ran for over a year in order to gather benefits data related to communication based crash avoidance. That made use of one of the parts of DSRC. I think of these as kind of mental parts, not physical partitions within the definition kind of logical partitions within the definition because they serve a cluster of use cases.
A lot of those crash avoidance kinds of things take place on channel 172 within spectrum allocation and that has been earmarked for these crash avoidance safety type of applications. The data exchange among vehicles in order to accomplish crash avoidance takes place in channel 172.
There is a corresponding use of channel 184 for a short protocol data units for public safety purposes, another group of use cases that people might include in their overall smart city concept but argued toward fire EMS, police and other public safety kinds of activities. That can take place on channel 184.
Then we have a group of five channels in the middle of the spectrum allocation, those of us that are familiar with the shorthand language referred to them as the control channel, service channel group of channels. It in the middle five. There are certain amount of control channel service channel activity that takes place using wave short protocol message style data distribution.
Again, they tend to be the type of application content that we feel should be uniformly deployed on a continent wide scale and be ubiquitously available to anyone who is participating in transportation activities. Think of the icy bridge warning or works on assert -- alert or a curve speed warning and that is the type of thing that everyone should have opportunity to have it available to them and we make use of this group of control channel, service channel elements within the middle of the bad in order to distribute those type of data units. The fourth part of the spectrum allocation that we are very much interested in because this is one of the ones that will give a lot of value to this particular medium and that is the ability to do vehicle oriented Internet protocol transport. This is something that makes use of the rest of the capacity of the communication media after we have served the primary safety and secondary mobility improvements kinds of needs with the other style of data distribution and the other style of transport medium. Internet protocol transport becomes available. This is the things that will that help people whose concept involves movement of a tremendous amount of data have alternative medium to wide area network cellular type of media if that medium is overloaded in your particular area.
So we are looking forward to people exploring the use of Internet protocol transport capabilities using this medium definition as an adjunct or even a primary means of moving large amounts of data to and from vehicles in your concept.
I keep mentioning his uniform data units that we are using this medium to distribute and if you go to the SAE J 2735 standard you will find these types of data units defined. This is something that has been developed by the transportation community and is the communication based version of the manual for uniform traffic control devices and it is the kind of common definition that any practitioner can go to and the common definition that any user can adapt to.
It is the thing that levels the information so that it becomes available to everyone.
These SAE J 2735 data units are equivalent of that red octagon stop sign and we are expecting every practitioner creating the data units to create them in this style so that every user of the data unit has the opportunity to use it.
Some of the group of data units probably will be most important in the Smart City kind of timeframe are the things that are highlighted in the short list at the bottom of this.
The basic safety message is probably the most ubiquitous data unit that we will find out there because that is the data unit created by every vehicle so that other vehicles around it will be aware of its situation. In speed heading, acceleration, the rest of the kinds of things that are needed in order to determine if a crash is imminent.
One of those data units related to controlled intersections single phase and timing, or the MEP that defines a controlled intersection we expected find in the Smart City installations. And then there is a whole family things called traveler information messages that are very useful for conveying warning, alert and the general information that you would like to have everyone operating in your area. Have the advantage of.
We transportation cannot keep emphasizing this enough, have over the years found that transportation systems work best at a fundamental level if everyone has access to certain key fundamental data.
We will be looking for creative ways on how they can be accomplished in the communication oriented implementations that you are probably thinking about. Step back if you are -- implementation concept requires you drive a particular direct brand of vehicle or you pay a particular subscription. Think about it again because that is something we have found does not work well in the transportation context. Think about the kinds of data that are distributed today to everyone so that everyone has this opportunity to benefit from the day you were trying to do. Anybody can walk onto the subway platform and see the station map and anybody driving down the streets see the familiar three color light and all of those kinds of things are extremely important for safe and efficient operation of those transportation activities and everybody has access to it. Think about how that could be part of your vision. Once you thought about that as part of your vision for your city it becomes much more plausible that your vision could be deployed on a continent wide basis.
Again, as we think about DSRC and how it drives some of the fundamental way we think about constructing the connected -- intelligent transportation system that will underlie your vision, with think about it in terms of maturity levels of DSRC and this is a good yardstick to see how far along your thinking is.
The first level of maturity is understanding how you can make use of that broadcast mode distribution of these ubiquitous -- ubiquitously uniformly defined data units. Particularly if you are trying to do crash avoidance and that something that is the first level of understanding.
Figuring out how to use those same uniformly defined data units for other safety improvements is kind of the second level of understanding. The third level of understanding is whether or not you can accomplish other style of data unit distribution using the other capacity, other channels of the medium and then the highest level of maturity and thinking is how you then later on ability to make use of the entire capacity of the medium. We think that comes into play by being able to make available Internet protocol transport.
Again, that is kind of the way of looking at your level of maturity and your understanding of how this very unique, very useful medium for a Smart City transportation oriented activity might be.
Keep in mind though one entity has to build all of the parts. DSRC is defined as a collaborative type of implementation. Different parties can contribute their part not necessarily knowing who the other contributors are as long as they collaborate with each other and to being so that they all have that mutual benefit.
Different parties can define and contributes part of the whole. For example the automotive industry in its aftermarket supply base can be the ones that bring you up to the maturity level I without any other kind of contributors. When you get into level II and three roadway operators become involved in the collaboration.
Bringing it up to level IV is going to take some unique and maybe new business arrangements between Internet service providers and the roadway operator and the automotive industry.
Again, in order to fully utilize capacity of this resource available, it will take some new and unique business arrangements that people should start to think about in order to be able to fully implement your vision.
Wrapping up a little bit. With think DSRC is going to become a key part of communications in anybody's Smart City vision. We know we already have large-scale pilots of this communication medium underway and that will exercise this reference architecture and begin to help us understand the full capacity of DSRC We have arrived at a consensus of interpretation of standards for this next generation so what you will see going forward is very uniformly implemented installations. We now have these little spot installations of this communication medium and the vehicles and travelers that interact with those installations will now have that opportunity to wander around to other installations and have that opportunity for a common experience.
We know there are a number of production programs underway to deliver components that make up that part of the physical system.
We are getting to the point where we think DSRC is ready to become part of the next generation of wireless medium.
You probably have started to see people starting to put together the concept for the next generation of these wireless mobile networks. But we are hoping that you will see and what we are hoping will come from that next generation is that it will become less industry centric and more inclusive. You are starting to see the level of maturation in the wireless mobile network area that understands that no one medium will serve every need. There is much more of a need for these different media to complement and cooperate with each other so that the users of these systems -- levels of expectations are met, independent of any one medium.
We are looking forward to this definition of the next generation of mobile virus network so we are mobile wireless networks and we look for to radio to access technology and this gives them technology [Indiscernible - static] in a portfolio of wireless services. DSRC was designed to meet very specific stakeholder needs within the transportation community and it could be a nice complement to the other radio services that are out there for doing data transport.
DSRC as it is designed today and asked it is being deployed to date could serve those significant vehicle use cases within the overall scheme of wireless communication.
Main points trying to get at here is that in the is Smart City Challenge projects we want people to be thinking in the back of their mind about how their vision could become part of a continent wide deployment. We want to see people come up with very creative ideas that serve a community and solve a particular transportation issue in a local area but people should also be thinking about how to hide makes is available to everyone? If it works well in my area, quite likely it will work well in other areas. That leads us tool -- to make it have -- having you [Indiscernible - static] with think that DSRC is one of the assets that is available for you to use that gives you the ability, engineering discipline to design your solution to your vision in such a way that it does have that ability to be scaled to a continent wide screen districts. Criminals of DSRC will lead you naturally to that kind of situation. [Indiscernible - static] that is what we need to make people interested in the Smart City Challenge aware of this medium and if you have not heard of it before hope you quickly become familiar with it.
If you have heard of it before hope you very quickly become familiar with its full capability because we think it will be a very important part of anybody's Smart City concept because we think it will help you focus your design and focus your implementation on something that has a higher likelihood of being useful beyond just your city.
With that I will turn it back to Brian to give you some wrap up points here at the tail end of this session.
Thank you. We scheduled this webinar to go information session to go for an hour so we will make sure we can address any questions of people may have and you can start cruising through the checkbox as there are several questions coming in around licensing and OB and different things like that. Some of the other folks on the chat have been answering as well.
They just blocked the slides.
I'm sorry.
We will get to that in a second. Will let you do that Walt. To wrap up we had several information sessions and all of them are online and I believe six and seven ones were put to the transportation/Smart City information website yesterday. Or the day before so those are all online. The DSRC information session will also be up soon.
With that we just continue to remind you that you can go to W.transportation.gov in Smart City, you can send questions to Smart City Challenge at in Smart City, you can send questions to SmartCityChallenge@DOT.gov so we have a few more minutes and we would like to remind people to please submit your questions via the checkbox and Walt you can expand the box and out if it is easier for you to see.
Okay just growing through the questions here and picking out a few of the key once there was one related to whether or not the cryptographic process we use should address and add to the latency and the short answer to that is no, the system was designed in order to accommodate that and has been designed in from the beginning. So all of the benefits assessment that was done in our crash avoidance experiment in Ann Arbor was done with that cryptic processes running so it is a natural part of the medium.
Questions about being 5.9 GHz being a licensed medium and the answer to that is yes, there are details related to obtaining and using licenses for this equipment.
Wealth, there is a question below deprivation licenses -- differentiating licenses [Indiscernible - static] [Indiscernible - multiple speakers]
There are two general classes of equipment, mobile equipment that is type of certified and type licensed and then the fixed type of equipment you might find at the site of the road will be site licensed and I would encourage people to go to the Secretary website to find out more details about obtaining those licenses. Process from their perspective is not very onerous.
Question from Dennis Bennett on power, backup battery, what happens when you lose power to the systems.
Same thing that happens when we lose power to any electronic medium.
Again something that people need to design into the concept they are working on, redundancy and resiliency are an important aspect and that is why we are encouraging people to get out of a mono medium type of mindset and start to think about how they can aggregate different communication medium so that they have this redundancy and resilience.
Power is always something needed with anything electrical and obviously it is important here as well. But think about it in terms of designing resilience and redundancy.
Chris is asking interesting questions around big event and basically congestion control of data. How do we handle when massive event comes out and all of these vehicles sending messages 10 times a second, will they overwhelm and RCO?
The question is yes, every communication medium has a capacity and there is upper limit to what you can accommodate, and the medium is designed so that there is actually engineered priorities.
If you get into a situation like that and things that have been deemed as highest priority typically things related to safety have first crack at the medium. This is very different than a lot of other wireless packet-based media. Cellular and Wi-Fi are all very agnostic to access anybody could have access on a pure level.
We have distinct levels of access built into it. You get into a situation where there is a tremendous amount of activity, safety stuff would get first priority and just like in the cellular experience that those same people will have, it will be everybody else fight it out for whatever is left. But we do have a distinct difference there in that safety related things and other things that have been identified as higher priority will have physical higher accessibility that other random things.
Wealth, talk about the are is you and its ability to process data and if there are a couple of questions near the top is the RSU passing data or analysis?
There is no one RSU but there are a lot of different meditations of what we call road equipment and the simplest one could be something that serves nothing more than a gateway and the thing that transforms data from wireless media to a backhaul medium for bridging from a vehicle to the Internet and that is probably the simplest thing and nothing more than a well-designed gateway. Others of those types of devices can be designed so they actually host application objects. You can have some data analytics that take place there, you can have the complementary application object to a vehicle object, hosted there. So you will find a whole variety of those types of devices available, are simple gateway style devices that support the use of the medium for Internet protocol transport, others are more sophisticated application hosting devices. So you will have all sorts of them.
Bottom of the page, Dean has a question about [Indiscernible - static] versus Internet of things and other communication protocols. Sure if you are familiar with the one [Indiscernible - multiple speakers]
I am not familiar with that particular one. There is a number of different media being explored right now. The think that is unique about DSRC is that it currently is operating in dedicated spectrum. Means you are mentioning here may likely are operating in the general-purpose unlicensed spectrum that is available out there, again, they may serve a particular corner of the Internet of things use cases, but the vehicle oriented priority types of applications tend to be served better by DSRC because it was engineered to do that specific task, and it is operating in licensed spectrum and such as does not have to compete with all of the other on licensed users out there -- unlicensed users out there.
Question probably in about coverage. Behind, and depends on the applications you are trying to do as well as indicated what you are trying to do and there is a range of what DSRC even has communications capability depends on the types of applications, will depend on how much DSRC implementation you want to do the Mac Walt, would you like to build on that?
The availability of the medium depends on its deployment. We are thinking maybe somewhere between 5-10-20 gateway roadside type of devices per square kilometer will give you a reasonable, uniform available coverage for this particular medium. Obviously if you only put up one of them in your city, it will only serve a circular area of roughly 300 m in radius.
You have to think about deploying that in a grid pattern or however the topology of your city may look in order to give you that uniform coverage everywhere. But is something in the order of 10, -- five for 10 or 15 [Indiscernible - low volume] columnar to give you a uniformly available coverage.
There is a question from Virginia, about the level of detail in the vision piece. As we indicate and as a type to indicate and the beginning of the session is that it is a high-level vision that is due to us but we felt that given the nature of dedicated short-range communications and essence to connect the vehicles, we want to do information session on this topic now some people understood more about the capabilities and opportunities.
I would even as that as this is an information session so that you can understand dedicated short-range communications and we feel that will be helpful to you but your proposal is a high-level vision.
Anything else?
Couple of others, I know the spectral roadside equipment plummet talks about height, I think it is dependent on line of sight issues, wherever you want to deploy it.
All sorts of things that come into factors there, going from historical preservation to whether or not there are trees in the area. Typically several meters above the roadway surface, but a lot of it depends on specific features in your environment.
Definitely not tall tower stuff. Went nearer to the ground, typically 5-10 m, 15 m off the ground.
There is a question about whether connected infrastructure goes dormant window vehicles are within a designated distance.
Depends on the implementation. Typically gateway type of equipment puts out a periodic begin so that approaching vehicles are able to become a fair -- aware of it and that typically does not go dormant, that is the only way this medium works is if these advertisements or begin type of indications let each other know that they are around. Correction: beacon.
Are there commercially available DSRC phones?
Interesting question, we have seen some mockups and PowerPoint presentations, but I don't know if anyone has actually announced the availability of a phone with a DSRC radio access technology service in it. We know people are capable of doing it because we had actually seen some samples of it. It is not a hard thing to do. Whether or not they are available, I do not know.
Thank you very much, Walt for participating with us and providing information. If anyone has less questions or you have questions higher up in the checkbox that we missed anyone to retype that in to make sure, we can trying to address that. We will obviously be -- Sarah has been taking all the questions that come in the checkbox and looking at them and updating the Q&A that we put on the transportation guidance/Smart City site, will of course look at this and see if there is anything officially we need to add into the Q&A.
With a that, if there are any less questions otherwise we are a few minutes over the time and we want to respect time for everybody and this was our eighth and at the moment the last of any scheduled information sessions that we have. If anyone is curious, we do not have any more scheduled. If we do schedule that we will announce the. Something happens. But otherwise we look forward to any questions that you sent to Smart City Challenge and DOT.gov. And the proposals that come in on February 4, thank you very March -- much and have a great afternoon.
Thank you.
That concludes our conference for today. You may now disconnect.