V2X communication

Vehicles' information exchange

V2X communication is the data exchange between vehicles and any communication-capable object. That might be another vehicle, a traffic light, or a smart phone hold in one's hand. Dependent on the communication partner, the communication is divided into different subclasses, where data flow may be bidirectional:

• V2V: vehicle to vehicle communication.
• V2I: vehicle to infrastructure communication.
• V2P: vehicle to pedestrian.

Mostly, communication is radio frequency based. Two different underlying technologies may be used: WLAN-based and cellular-based. While in the WLAN-based approach vehicles, when in range, build up an ad-hoc network, in a cellular network, infrastructure is needed. As infrastructure is costly, it is not available everywhere. Thus, so far, cellular communication is not a stand alone solution. Although vehicular communication uses the same underlying technologies as most of us use daily by means of our smart phones, it differs significantly: Compared to the high data volumes pictures and videos consume, in vehicular networks only small data packets are exchanged. But for that the data need to be exchanged reliable and with a very low latency.