Millions of cars roll along the highways, and tailbacks are now the norm. Existing systems that transmit traffic jam warnings to navigation equipment are already operating at full capacity. A new system, mobile.info, can cope – even with increasing volumes of traffic.
A quick trip to the mountains at the weekend – the prospect of a hike in unspoilt scenery is very enticing. But before you can enjoy the sunshine in the alpine meadows and relax with a beer at a mountain inn, you often have to negotiate your way around road works, traffic jams and accidents. Traffic reports on the radio, text warnings to your cell phone and digital traffic message channel information TMC, transmitted via FM-RDS to your navigation system, can all help. However, the cell phone option is not cheap, especially when large amounts of information are to be delivered to a lot of people. The transmission of TMC information is limited to between 100 and 300 bits per second and the system has almost reached capacity, which means that only the most vital information can be transmitted at busy periods.
Together with a number of industry partners, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS have developed mobile.info, a platform based on digital radio technology. With its help, traffic information can be transmitted from a control center to navigation systems and radios at rates of up to several thousand bits per second, allowing up to 200 times more messages to be sent than is currently possible with TMC. “Premium and value-added services are encrypted and only available to subscribers. The actual traffic warning system that would warn you of a motorist driving against the flow of traffic, for example, remains unencrypted,” says Birgit Bartel-Kurz,
project manager responsible for the development of the encryption technology at the IIS. For the duration of your holiday in Italy, for instance, you could subscribe to the information for this region. Or car manufacturers could forward information about available parking spaces exclusively to owners of their vehicles. Administrative information, such as the length of the subscription, is transmitted along with every item of traffic news. “This administrative information has to be heavily compressed,” explains Bartel-Kurz. To keep hackers at bay, the researchers developed a system that constantly generates new keys. The system also has another advantage: Every point on the digital maps that form the basis of the system can be indicated, even small streets in the downtown area. Conventional TMC systems, on the other hand, are restricted to a list of reference points that are primarily concentrated along highways and are not much help in the city. The mobile.info platform will begin operational tests in May. BMW, Audi and VW are providing a number of vehicles and drivers for this purpose. The system could go into regular operation from 2008.