Toyota to Sponsor Research on Vehicular Communications

Thanks to a recent $35,000 cash gift from the Toyota InfoTechnology Center USA (Toyota ITC), headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., engineers in the Wireless Institute will perform research on communications for safety-critical vehicular applications.

This research, directed by Christian Poellabauer, associate professor of computer science and engineering, attempts to improve the reliability of dedicated short-range communications (DSRC), which are the foundation for numerous applications, such as collision warning, blind-spot warning, lane change warning and highway merge assistance. With this research Poellabauer and his collaborator at Toyota ITC, John Kenney (Ph.D. 1988, Notre Dame), expect to develop enhancements of current and future communication standards for wireless access in vehicular environments using the licensed band of 5.9 GHz.