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New Technologies for Integrated Road Telecommunication Systems

Introduction The latest experience of the Russian roads utilization shows that the most part of the actual transport problems is caused by very poor effectiveness of traffic management and lack of proper telecommunication services provision.

The rising of traffic management effectiveness is strongly connected with building of Automated Traffic Management System (ATMS), which is inalienable component of the Intellectual Transport System (ITS). ITS in its turn is the complex information processing system and transport management one, based on brand new information and telecommunication technologies and management methods.

Metropolitan or regional ITS may include several local subsystems to realize some special functions – to name a few – metropolitan transport dispatching and control/management, traffic management  on roads and highways, special agencies vehicles management (ambulance, police, firefighters etc.).

Depending on transport systems peculiarities and problem priority of management subjects, the structure and functional characteristics of subsystems may vary, and that has definite effect on the architecture of the ITS

ATMS, as a part of ITS, performs management and information processing functions, which are as follows:

Traffic management;

Traffic intensity information provision;

Electronic payments organization;

Security and crisis situation management.

Basically, the subsystems of ATMS could be presented as a set of remote road devices (peripheral devices at Fig.1), controllers, working terminals plugged in the data transmission network and main and local management centers (control center and access node at Fig.1).

Integrated Road Telecommunication System

Variable information traffic signs (VITS), multiposition road indicators, vehicle detectors, automatic road meteorological stations, video surveillance cameras could be used in the character of remote or peripheral devices.

The telecommunication part of the ATMS includes Integrated Road Telecommunication System (IRTS). Stable operation of telecom systems on main roads can increase safety level of traffic flows and provide effective functioning of the road maintenance services, such as security and rescue operations in the emergency situations.

IRTS could contain:

Information exchange subsystem;

Mobile objects communication subsystem;

Management and technical maintenance subsystem;

Information security subsystem;

Chargeable basis infocommunication services subsystem (traditional telecom services of a carrier).

 

Analysis of ITS development stage information in various countries (industrial leaders - USA, EU, Japan, Australia and future competitors Brazil, China, Korea) shows us that Russia is behind them in building and utilization separate ITS subsystems.  The integration of those subsystems is out of the question. 

ATMS’ of various complexity have been installing in almost every big city of any industrially developed country. The set of subsystems realized in a given ATMS depends on a few factors: climate conditions, population density, transport saturation, telecom commercial services need.

The main requirements to the system

ATMS and ITS are built to solve two major problems of effective function in national road management:

Increasing of transport infrastructure safety level;

Modern telecommunication services provision.

A few requirements were formulated to guarantee ATMS working and  infocommunication services delivery:

Flexible functionality;

Stability;

Economy.

The term "flexible functionality" of ATMS means its quality characterizing the ability to provide simultaneous and joint work of great amount of functional subsystems. The structure of such the systems was described above.

First of all, to make the various subsystems fully functional it's necessary to provide the transmission of various types of traffic (i.e. voice, video, data) among the given customers. This defines, in its turn, the main structural and technological demands to the ATMS and channels bandwidth, QoS and security requirements as well.

By stability of AMTS we will mean its quality characterizing the aptitude for performing desirable functions of telecommunication services provision in the normal and abnormal conditions. Hence, the stability is a complex attribute which unites reliability and survivability

The AMTS stability must be provided by the well-grounded solutions of the system's structure and topology, equipment selection, proper technological and technical approaches, rational management, OAM and information security system building.

Economy requirements are natural and defined by the striving for cost minimization while building and utilizing ATMS, for income in- crease, for perspective investment protection.

Solutions

Fulfillment of the abovementioned requirements is possible using modern and perspective telecom technologies only. Nowadays, the most effective solutions offer to use conceptual approaches and statements of NGN (Next Generation Network).

The creating of AMTS using NGN principles envisages the fact that the integrated telecommunication system must have a few qualities, which are as follows:

Multiserviceability quality, that is characterized by the independence of the telecom services technologies from transport ones;

Multimedia enabled transport quality, i.e. the ability to transport multicomponent traffic (video, voice, data)  with necessary synchronization between them in real time;

Intellectuality. This is the possibility to organize service, call or connection control from the user part;

Invariability, that make the service access possible notwithstanding the transport technology is used;

Multicarrier support, that is the ability to allow a whole set of carriers to participate in the process of service provision.

The possibilities of the technologies the future network will be based on is the most important thing that will influence on the qualities of the telecommunication system. Therefore, the common procedure of AMTS design could be presented as follows:

Base technology selection;

System structure definition;

High level topology design.

Selecting the basis technology for physical layer it is absolutely necessary to take into account the fact that the topology of multiservice IRTS network must be based on the existing infrastructure of fiber optic cables.

The basis technologies usually used in multiservice networks building are SDH/SONET, ethernet in all it's forms, ATM, IP/MPLS, WDM. Basing ourselves on current world experience we can state that building transport technology on ethernet is 1.5 to 1.7 times less expensive than utilizing SDH/ATM channels.

Having in mind the bandwidth requirements of the future network, its cost and a few more parameters and taking into account "Conceptual statements of multiservice networks building in Russia" the most reasonable variant for IRTS is ethernet based  transport network.

Also there's great interest to the relatively new family of perspective technologies for multiservice networks - Passive Optical Networks  (PON) technologies.

The main feature of this family is its ability to organize distribution network and access one using single fiber only. Well, that is the ad- vantage and its drawback at the same time. Notwithstanding the fiber economy the solutions based on this technology are pretty expensive now but one can see definite bright technological outlooks in the context of  resiliency, survivability and cost questions.

Therefore, in the near future the solutions based on PON will have a great chance to become the real competitors to the, so to say, "classic approaches" in terms of performance and economical component.

To organize radiolinks for operation and maintenance functions, broadband radioaccess to mobile and separate stationary objects and to provide fiber facilities reserve, operation radiocommunication subsystem must be extracted out of the IRTS structure. This demands for basic technologies selection those subsystems based on.

Operation and maintenance radiolinks subsystem is destined for:

Telecommunications services provision for mobile objects at road building and utilization stages;

Integrated environment creation, that make various divisions and services interaction possible;

Control and dispatch centers building which manages mobile and stationary objects (subscribers);

Promotion of IRTS commercial using.

Operation and maintenance radiolinks subsystem falls under very strict stability requirements in various situations, including network overload, strong interference and so on.

Rich experience of road telecommunications systems utilization in Sweden, Norway, Germany and  Denmark shows that the most reasonable technology for radioaccess is TETRA.

TETRA is unified road telecommunications standard all over EU as we speak.

Foreign TETRA using experience was the basis at the IRTS design and building projects at Russia – federal road Moscow- St.Petersburg-Vyborg-state border road (IRTS “Russia”), St.Petersburg circular road and a few more.

The alternative variant of operational radiocommuncation subsystem is leasing GSM virtual enterprise network. In this case the man- aging  company of the IRTS becomes the corporate subscriber of a GSM cellular network carrier.

The advantages of this approach are as follows:

transparency of organizational and technical events;

rapid changes in subscriber base and amount of provisioned services.

The disadvantages are the ones that usually met in cellular net- works, to name a few:

not the highest quality of transmission;

low stability (especially at network overload situations).

Hence, the corporate network based on cellular resources satisfies the operation and maintenance subsystem requirements to a certain extent only. However such the decisions have found its realization in a few European countries.

Broadband access subsystem is to solve some basic problems:

mobile and separate stationary objects broadband radio access to the transport network, including access at the various design and building stages of IRTS;

ensuring of required IRTS stability parameters by reserving the most important fiber-optic trunks;

commercial subscribers broadband radio access to the info- communication services of IRTS.

We consider various types of WLAN (Wireless Local Area Net- work) technologies in the character of the main standards for broad- band radio access subsystem:

IEEE 802.11 family (Wi-Fi). The Wi-Fi transmission rate reaches 50Mbits/s at 300 f. distance and that may fully provide ser- vices requirements.

IEEE 802.16 (Wi-MAX). Wi-MAX is able to provide 70 Mbits/s at 20 miles, in ideal conditions of course.

The broadband wireless communication has been considering in the character of the real alternative to the traditional modes of high- speed subscriber access (copper local loop for example) for a long time. From the large access networks point of view the most perspective technology is Wi-MAX (IEEE 802.16/802.16a), no doubt, that technology was developed to organize wireless broadband access to the metropolitan area networks (MAN).

Nowadays, sufficient foreign experience of IRTS creating and utilizing has been accommodating. At the same time, the complexity of such the systems defines the absence of ready-to-go integrated solutions. That’s why the deep research of the very wide range of questions is required as this article has shown.

The best example of such the research is the creation of Saint- Petersburg Western high-speed diameter in Russia which has its pro- ject pre-design and design stages at JSC Giprosvyaz SPb company.

Alexei Rouine is 27, and lives in St.- Petersburg, Russia.  He has a diploma with distinction from St.- Petersburg's State University of Telecommunications of Prof. Bounch-Bruyevich, as well as a Ph.D degree from the same university.

He was the winner of Russian Nation- wide 2002 RAD Data Communications Scholarship Contest, and a participant of special internship program which took place within the frame work of The Tele- communications an internship Scheme implemented by Metromedia International Telecommunications, Inc., Prince of Wales Business Leaders Forum and Bonch-Bruyevich Telecommunications University in 2000. 

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