NTCIP Center-to-Center Standards Group

Overview

The National Transportation Communications for ITS Protocol (NTCIP) family of standards, created jointly by AASHTO, ITE and NEMA, addresses primarily the interfaces between a transportation management center, the ITS field devices it manages, and other centers. They provide both the rules for communicating (called protocols) and the vocabulary (called objects, data elements, and messages) necessary to exchange information between ITS systems.  

The NTCIP Center-to-Center (NTCIP C2C) Group of Standards addresses the communications protocols between two centers (e.g. two traffic management centers exchanging information to facilitate regional coordination of traffic signals). Some of the communication protocols covered by this family are DATEX-ASN, XML, and FTP. These protocols are common across all Center-to-Center interfaces in the National ITS Architecture, and rather than repeat the entire list for each architecture flow, we have created this summary entry – the NTCIP C2C Group of communications standards. 

The standards that describe the "vocabulary" (data elements and messages) are mapped to specific architecture flows rather than the entire set of NTCIP C2C interfaces. In the regional traffic coordination example above, the Traffic Management Data Dictionary and Message Set for External TMC Communications (TMDD and MS/ETMCC) standard would be mapped to the specific flows between two Traffic Management Subsystems.  

In order to satisfy a wide spectrum of system and regional communications requirements, Center-to-Center ITS deployments should each implement the combinations of the following NTCIP C2C communications protocols that best meet their needs. 

This Group includes the following Standards Activities:

Includes

NTCIP 1102: Octet Encoding Rules (OER) Base Protocol
NTCIP 1104: Center-to-Center Naming Convention Specification
NTCIP 2104: Ethernet Subnetwork Profile
NTCIP 2202: Internet (TCP/IP and UDP/IP) Transport Profile
NTCIP 2303: File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Application Profile
NTCIP 2304: Application Profile for DATEX-ASN (AP-DATEX)
NTCIP 2306: Application Profile for XML Message Encoding and Transport in ITS Center-to-Center Communications (C2C XML)