Abstract-Vehicles equipped with intelligent systems designed to prevent accidents, such as collision warning systems (CWSs) or lane-keeping assistance (LKA), are now on the market. The next step in reducing road accidents is to coordinate such vehicles in advance not only to avoid collisions but to improve traffic flow as well. To this end, vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications are essential to properly manage traffic situations. This paper describes the AUTOPIA approach toward an intelligent traffic management system based on V2I communications. A fuzzy-based control algorithm that takes into account each vehicle's safe and comfortable distance and speed adjustment for collision avoidance and better traffic flow has been developed. The proposed solution was validated by an IEEE-802.11p-based communications study. The entire system showed good performance in testing in realworld scenarios, first by computer simulation and then with real vehicles.

The development of telemedicine programs for the public health network of the Department of Cauca, Colombia, (Department is the major political and territorial division of the country. The Department of Cauca is located on the Pacific coast in the southwest of the country.) would make it possible to satisfy many identified needs such as medical coordination, continuing education, epidemiologic surveillance, patient referral and counterreferral, and an end to the feeling of isolation among professionals who work in rural health centers. Nevertheless, geographic, economic, and social difficulties, and the lack of a telecommunication infrastructure in areas with these characteristics present a challenge of such magnitude that the majority of existing telemedicine projects in Colombia have been centered in urban or other areas which present fewer difficulties. In the municipality of Silvia, the University of Cauca has established a prototype network using the "Hispano-American Health Link" (EHAS in Spanish) program technologies, which uses very high frequency (VHF) and wireless fidelity, (WiFi, a set of standards for wireless local area networks) radio systems for the deployment of low-cost voice and data networks. Over this network information access and exchange services have been developed, in order to meet the needs identified above. The objectives were to obtain information about the development of the project's activities and their possible impact. Project telecommunication network and information services are described, and the results and conclusions of the first evaluation are presented.

An important goal in the field of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) is to provide driving aids aimed at preventing accidents and reducing the number of traffic victims. The commonest traffic accidents in urban areas are due to sudden braking that demands a very fast response on the part of drivers. Attempts to solve this problem have motivated many ITS advances including the detection of the intention of surrounding cars using lasers, radars or cameras. However, this might not be enough to increase safety when there is a danger of collision. Vehicle to vehicle communications are needed to ensure that the other intentions of cars are also available. The article describes the development of a controller to perform an emergency stop via an electro-hydraulic braking system employed on dry asphalt. An original V2V communication scheme based on WiFi cards has been used for broadcasting positioning information to other vehicles. The reliability of the scheme has been theoretically analyzed to estimate its performance when the number of vehicles involved is much higher. This controller has been incorporated into the AUTOPIA program control for automatic cars. The system has been implemented in Citroën C3 Pluriel, and various tests were performed to evaluate its operation.

Abstract. Ad-hoc wireless networks are constituted by routers enabled to establish wireless links among them in a mesh topology. This kind of networks are becoming very popular because of their potential, low cost and ease of deployment, specially when IEEE 802.11b wireless technology is used. There has been a lot of research in the design of protocols and algorithms for improving the performance of this kind of networks, and there have also been many efforts in studying the particular characteristics of their behavior for packet switching, specially when realtime traffic is a concern. However, real implementations and testbeds are scarce, and even those few well known interesting experiences are not QoS-aware and their implementation details are not consistent. This paper presents the design of a 802.11b multi-hop QoS-aware mesh network specifically designed for isolated rural environments by means of adapting the most appropriated software implementations available for IP auto-configuration, QoS-aware traffic control and dynamic multi-hop routing. This proposed network is used as a testbed for driving some initial experiments that aim to measure its performance when supporting both elastic and real-time traffic. The evaluation includes guidelines for a QoS-aware deployment of the network and recommendations for further work that can improve these results.

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