Communication area synthesis for next generation highway ETC systems

摘要

In this paper, some requirements of next generation highway electronic toll collection (ETC) systems are presented. In particular, the trend of moving toward a completely open road free-flow tolling concept that, ideally, comprises the possibility of having vehicles with speed up to 200 km/h, encourages the elongation of the communication area or, however, a more efficient synthesis of the antenna radiation pattern. For this reason, the concept of communication area in the context of highway radio-frequency identification (RFID) based ETC is first investigated, and then a simple methodology with antenna array to synthesize a specific communication area by exploiting well known synthesis techniques, e.g. Tschebyscheff distribution, is proposed.