In investigating how IMS could be used within intelligent transport systems (ITS), students at Luleå University of Technology (LTU) in Sweden have developed a mobile application prototype, iRide, that warns drivers of hazardous conditions on the road.
An IMS-based prototype, iRide is connected to a broader framework called iRoad, a large-scale ITS project to make roads “intelligent” and allow them to play an active role in improving road safety and the driving experience. The purpose of iRide is to improve safety for road users exposed to dangerous road conditions. It processes information obtained from iRoad infrastructure and issues warnings to drivers and passengers, based on data such as temperature, humidity and distance to the nearest car.
Wolfgang Birk, assistant professor at LTU, is the project manager and research leader for the iRoad project. He says wireless sensors installed in the road surface allow a positioning service for detecting today’s vehicles as well as future “intelligent” vehicles, with precision down to tens of centimeters. “This will solve the problem of the insufficient accuracy of safety features provided by current solutions, such as on-board sensors and GPS with map data,” Birk says.
Evgeny Osipov, assistant professor at LTU, is the scientific leader of the LTU Communications Network research group, and responsible for the overall communications architecture of iRoad. “In order to deliver warnings for dangers occurring beyond the range of in-car sensor devices, and communicate this information not only to new intelligent cars but also to drivers of older vehicles, we need a communication technology that covers all categories of users,” Osipov says. “GPS or 3G would be a good candidate carrier in this case. So when Ericsson contacted us to formulate a course project for undergraduate students to be developed using the Ericsson IMS platform, I thought it would be an interesting idea to implement a prototype of a simple application that delivers the information from iRoad sensors to drivers’ and passengers’ mobile terminals.”
Cooperation on the Ericsson Mobile Java Communication Framework (MJCF), a set of IMS enablers available via a web portal, was part of the agreement with Ericsson.
Muslim Elkotob, PhD student at the LTU Communications Networks group, designed the IMS-side architecture of the iRide application, and led the student team that made a working prototype. Elkotob, who has prior IMS experience from Germany, says the cooperation with Ericsson had a dual purpose: for Ericsson, to improve the MJCF in an open-source manner, and for LTU, to develop iRide. “We put a lot of effort into designing efficient processing algorithms, on the server back-end, which are able to handle large amounts of data in real time. This was an important part of the work, as was developing a user interface for iRide using colors and special effects for big-screen mobiles,” he says.
“Because MJCF is still in its testing phase, the meeting arranged by Ericsson with other people working with IMS was also very valuable. There is still room for improvements in MJCF, for example to allow more real-time multimedia transfers from mobile devices to cars.”
Birk and Osipov say the iRoad project continues to generate interesting use cases and possibilities for further cooperation with Ericsson. From an ITS perspective, they say, IMS offers many opportunities, opening up new ways of communication between the road surface, vehicles, drivers, traffic managers and telecom operators. They believe that native support for low power sensor networks in systems such as IMS is needed in near future.
