Wireless Medium monitoring : Visualisation

Abstract: Vehicle safety applications such as collision avoidance, emergency braking etc., based on vehicle-to-vehicle communications are promising new technology, diminishing the number of accidents on roads. The functioning of these safety applications depends on continuous exchange of Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAM) between the vehicles through wireless communications making them aware of each other. Messages are also logged by each vehicle in their log files. However reliability and availability of these applications depends on the quality of wireless communication between the vehicles. Wireless link tends to get vulnerable due to a number of static (building, terrains etc.) and dynamic obstacles (climatic conditions, traffic environments etc.) causing the effects of shadowing, reflection, scattering etc. These are examples of the different causes to communication disturbances between vehicles that indirectly also influence safety applications. It is therefore important to have better tools to examine the communication quality which might not be possible by manually scanning the log files. Our thesis work uses Visualisation technology to efficiently display the quality of communication within a range using log files generated from measuring the communication between the vehicles. We have investigated various Visualisation techniques and approaches appropriate for our task. However we choose to use the Pixel Map based approach, which is a combination of two technologies, Maps and computer graphics to precisely visualize quality at each location. By using this approach we are able to make a tool that show how communication quality is affected by various static and dynamic obstacles at different geographical locations leading towards the improvement of safety applications.