Intelligent transportation spaces: Vehicles, traffic, communications, and beyond

Recent years have witnessed numerous technical breakthroughs in electronics, computing, sensing, robotics, control, signal processing, and communications. These have significantly advanced the state of applications of intelligent transportation systems. More recently, as one leading effort toward the cyber-physical-social system, the concept of intelligent transportation spaces was proposed to further improve the vehicles, traffic, and transportation safety, efficiency and sustainability. ITSp integrate not only various ITS modules, but also pedestrians, vehicles, roadside infrastructures, traffic management centers, sensors, and satellites. With distributed and pervasive intelligence, ITSp clearly impose some stringent requirements on the information exchange among all entities within the ITSp, in terms of the information availability, reliability, fidelity, and timeliness. These requirements, together with the high mobility of vehicles and the highly variable network topology, make the communications and networking for ITSp very challenging. This article will introduce the concept of ITSp and analyze possible communication technology candidates for ITSp. Further discussions will also be provided at the end of this article.