Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications through Tires

The goal of this undergraduate student project was to review various vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication initiatives and investigate the possible benefits of placing vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems in tires. There are a number of reasons why  this could prove to be the best location. The tires provide four readily accessible mounting platforms that vary the height above the ground, which can help to avoid bad transmission areas.

A small scale demonstration of tire-to-tire communications was built using bicycles. The motivation behind this was to have a physical example of working tire-to-tire communications, and to be able to run simple experiments to evaluate the communication quality between rotating platforms. 

The final system had two nodes mounted on separate bikes. Each bike measured its own speed and distance traveled, and received the current speed and distance of the other bike over its radio. The RSSI between the two nodes was also measured and recorded. One of the nodes relayed all information wirelessly to a base station on a computer. A simple GUI allowed the user to view and save data.

Publication:

C. Motsinger and T. Hubing, "A Review of Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Initiatives," Clemson Vehicular Electronics Laboratory Technical Report: CVEL-07-003, October 2007.