NEC participated in the tests with a vehicular communication system made up of its LinkBird-MX hardware communication platform and NEC’s C2X-Software Development Kit. The system has already been successfully evaluated by several car manufacturers and is used in numerous R&D projects and field trials across Europe. The NEC software is also the reference vehicle implementation of the EU DRIVE C2X project, a major European field operational test (FOT) for Car-2-X communication.
NEC is a leading contributor to the GeoNetworking protocol, an Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) network-layer protocol that provides geographical addressing, routing and forwarding for vehicular networks. NEC played a key role in developing vehicular networks routing technology and bringing the GeoNetworking protocol from a research idea to a mature standard. This standard is going to be trialed in large-scale Car-2-X communication FOTs in Europe in the next months.
The tests - held in Helmond, the Netherlands in November 2011 - focused on both GeoNetworking and the ETSI Facilities protocols, which carry ITS-specific information to be used by multiple applications and systems. They demonstrated the maturity of ETSI communications standards for cooperative vehicles and roadside systems and the interoperability of 14 different vendor implementations. The multi-vendor interoperability of these protocols is a major step towards further development and deployment of next generation ITS applications, where vehicles and road infrastructure systems will be able to communicate with each other to improve traffic safety and efficiency.