Charalampos Theopemptou
Lecturer HTI
Wired Communications and IT manager
Cyprus Rally

After a successful bid in 2000, the Cyprus Rally was promoted to a World Rally Championship (WRC) status by FIA, the world governing body in motorsport.

This is not only the biggest annual sporting event in Cyprus, but in the whole of the Middle East and we are of course very proud to be running a World Rally Championship event.

Just to give a brief outline of the interest world wide for this event, it should suffice to say that in September 2000, 314 journalists and photographers covered the event, coming from as far as Australia, Japan and Argentina, as well as Europe and the Middle East.

Cyprus also entered the homes of billions of television viewers in 186 countries and it gained literally thousands of column inches in the written press. It is very difficult to obtain statistics as to how many people came to the island to follow the event, but that weekend in September it was very hard to find a hotel room in Limassol with a great number of visitors staying over in Paphos and in Larnaca. The Royal Automobile Club in UK estimates that the overall income to a country from a WRC event is approximately 15million pounds.

An added benefit is the inclusion of the Cyprus Rally in all the related PC and Sony Play-Station games. A European firm has already filmed in detail the entire Cyprus Rally 2001 route for inclusion in a 3 dimensional presentation of the event over the Internet.

The running of a world event of this type, with manufacturers spending millions of pounds in preparing their teams, comes with a great number of regulations, procedures and directives that need to be followed closely. Otherwise, the event will be taken up by another country, and there are many with their eyes set on securing this event. So, what does it take to run event of this type?

In order to prevent teams from running unauthorized service stops and in addition making sure that a car stays in its prescribed route, FIA fits into each of the main competing cars, a GPS recording module. This is a small device, the size of a cigarette packet running on batteries, which is attached inside the competition car. On arrival, the FIA engineer collects all the modules, which when hooked on his laptop give out statistics on the route followed, the duration and time of any stops and other details.

This is not the only method used to monitor the competition cars, as there is an FIA airplane and a helicopter flying above the routes.

FIA rules specify an accuracy better than a tenth of a second. It is obvious that manually activated timings cannot be used. There are three systems worldwide, which are developed for WRC event timing and are worth considering. These are a system used in Australia, a system developed by a European firm and the system developed by Rally Argentina. The Rally Argentina system is also used by other Rally organisers and because of its low price and excellent support was selected for use in our event.

The Argentineans fit every competing car with a module that provides to the sensors the identity (number) of the car. Sensors are placed at the beginning and end, of every timed special stage, so as soon as the competing car crosses, at the sign of the marshal, the start line the street sensors detect this. The driver runs through the special stage as fast as he can. As soon as he crosses the finish line, the outside street sensors will also detect the car number and make a note of the time. So, this way we know the start and finish times and we can therefore compute the time it took the driver to do the special stage. Therefore, that solves the problem of accuracy.

This of course is not enough. A way must be devised to send the results to the main computers that do all the calculations. The solution to this is to use radio sets attached to each street sensor to transmit the time and car numbers to the main computer for processing.

Problem is that the rally takes place in rural areas, in deep valleys and gorges and it is not easy to maintain a radio link with headquarters.

The solution we arrived at in order to maintain a constantly running link with the sensors, was to fit two small airplanes with a number of radio repeaters and have them in turn fly high, over the rally route. An aerial fitted on the roof of the hotel used for the headquarters (HQ) in Limassol, picks up the retransmitted signals from the plane.

As a result, the computer at HQ is updated within seconds and it provides instant and accurate results.

The rally HQ is the place where many functions take place before and during the rally and is also the place where the computing center is housed.

With hundreds of reporters, FIA representatives and manufacturers using an overall number of 80 computers meant that care should be taken in assuring the high performance levels expected.

In addition to the rally HQ, a nearby hotel was used to house the press and the manufacturers.

So in order to provide the highest performance a switch based network design is used.

Four 24-port Intel switches are used, two in each hotel and the two hotels are linked together via a 100BASE-FX Fiber optic link. All network cabling is Cat-5, ensuring 100Mbits over 100BASE-TX.

In order to maintain high speed processing of the results, two high-speed Windows NT servers are used for running the Argentinean results software, whose front end, is based on Visual FoxPro. The servers are arranged in order to provide backup in the case of a hardware failure and are of course powered through a large UPS (Uninterruptible Power System).

In order to handle the large throughput to the network, each server is fitted with four Ethernet cards configured for load sharing.

In 2000, three days before the event, a test was run on 65 computers connected to these servers that simulated results enquiries just to make sure that the performance was as expected. The CPU activity of the servers did not exceed the ten percent mark. It is generally accepted that over 50% loading is a problem and that 70% is not acceptable.

The high performance of the system was noticed and commented upon by everybody.

The protocol used throughout the network is TCP/IP.

A main (Primary Domain Controller) Windows NT server together with a back up (Backup Domain Controller) are used for handling the logins, the word processing and other rally documents for internal use. These servers also auto-configured all the client PCs in the network through the DHCP services of NT.

For internal and external communication, an Email server is configured with accounts generated for all the users. The Internet server of the Cyprus Automobile Association (CAA), which is located in USA under the domain CyprusAA.org, has a corporate Email pop account, that collects all the email addressed to CyprusAA.org. The mail server at HQ collects all these emails and distributes them internally to its users, thus giving the ability to all, to send and receive internal and external email.

For permanent internet connectivity, a 1Mbit HDSL lease line is installed by CYTA and all the internet traffic is handled by a fast CISCO router based on the NAT protocol, since all internal IP numbers used, are "private" 10.0.0.0 numbers.

A sixth server is used for handling the process of updating the Internet website. Details of this appear further below.

Manufacturers and especially press require the provision of ISDN lines.

15 ISDN lines will be installed in 2001 in Rally HQ and these will be used for live links and radio interviews, but mostly for linking directly to papers and magazines for uploading pictures and reports.

Telephone facilities are provided through an Ericsson system which handles most of the 110 telephone lines and the 80 extensions that are installed over, again, Cat-5 wiring.

An event like this draws attention from allover the world, as it is the only way that fans can follow the action from their homes.

In order to handle the heavy load, a server is hired in the United States running Red Hat Linux.

The results pages are designed using include directives with initially blank text files. The Argentinean software automatically produces an HTML coded page every time a car crosses the finish line of the special stage. The files were automatically stored in a server and they are then uploaded to the Internet using FTP software. This way, users can see the results on the Internet; within approximately one minute from the time, the car crossed the finish.

The web server was accessed over 1.5 million times during the rally in 2000. In the days leading to the 2001 event, the server is accessed about 20000 times per day.

GSM mobile phones have the ability to not only accept short length text messages, but can also browse specially designed WAP pages.

To provide these services, a special script was developed internally by CYTA and was made accessible over the Internet in secure format. At the end of each special stage, a form is completed on the Internet and the results are sent to all the mobiles that are kept on list. The same script automatically generates a WAP page on the Internet. These services proved to be very popular with everybody in 2000.

When you are in charge of running the rally, at rally control, this is the hottest question that you face. This is mainly because one needs to first know as soon as possible, if there is an accident and secondly if the road is blocked. Of the many helicopters that follow the rally, one is equipped to handle emergencies but ambulances are also placed in each special stage to handle these situations.

Nevertheless, the length and spread of the rally, is still a problem at rally control. Therefore, in order to provide at least a partial solution to this problem, the Argentinean system, uses sets of sensors spread throughout the special stages.

This way, rally control at HQ, knows which car passed from each point. This is provided graphically on monitors with the software estimating the time taken to reach each sensor and providing an alarm if a car is late.