In February, the Obama administration pushed for the implementation of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology when it partnered with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to implement the technology by 2020. The goal is to have automobiles communicate with each other and provide alerts to drivers in the event there are roadside hazards. This technology has many different applications and opportunities for industries in automotive, telecommunications, emergency services, insurance, entertainment and more. One of the companies in the telecommunications sector, Sprint (News - Alert), has developed a solution designed to take advantage of this growing market with its Spring Velocity platform.
The Sprint Connected Vehicle Platform was designed to give automakers a V2V and Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) functionality as the technology keeps evolving with an open and flexible solution that allows integration of different complex components.
By providing the infrastructure for automobiles to easily deploy V2V and V2X applications in their vehicles, Sprint is basically laying the groundwork for a mesh network with millions of nodes, which would be the vehicles. Once the system is in place, it serves as a powerful user interface and an integrated mobile communication system. This gives individual consumers as well as third-party developers a platform in which to create different products and services addressing safety, entertainment, healthcare and virtually anything else they can imagine.
The readily available technology in today's vehicles such as GPS, sensors, cameras, communications and more can be integrated to create new solutions. Working with the head unit (HU) and telematics control unit (TCU), Sprint allows vendors to integrate directly within the vehicle system by supporting embedded/smart phone hybrid connectivity solutions for safety and diagnostics as well as other applications.
In order for vehicles to communicate with each other it requires a mesh network. This means every vehicle, traffic signal or any other infrastructure that is connected is able to send, capture and retransmit signals. These vehicles send their speed, location, direction of travel, braking and other functions using dedicated short-range communications (DSRC). Because V2V is still evolving and government regulators have not put in place laws to deal with the technology, it will be sometime before we see the full implementation.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson