California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

The objective of this paper is to design the network layer of a communication stack to be used in Automated Highway Systems (AHS). The communication model we propose allows cars to form private subnets, the configuration of which can change dynamically. Each car be part of multiple subnets and can send broadcast, multicast and point-to-point messages to other vehicles (both on the same subnet and on others, through a routing mechanism). Each subnet is managed by a server: a car that is in charge of accepting/rejecting join requests and of keeping a consistent state within the subnet. Finally we pro-pose an AHS addressing scheme and an API implementing the discussed functionality.