Improving Emergency Collision Avoidance with Vehicle to Vehicle Communications

Road accidents and traffic congestion are challenging issues for global transport systems. Autonomous vehicles and connected vehicles are promising technologies to improve road safety and reduce traffic congestion. In this paper we investigate the performance of connected vehicles and assess the positive impact of connected vehicles on the collaborative road safety applications. To achieve the research goal, we first develop a low cost and scalable connected vehicles testbed, which consists of laptops equipped with Wi-Fi transceivers. The main concern is that collaborative road safety applications need to be widely tested with vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications. However, the commercial dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) devices are very expensive, which makes it difficult to set up a large connected vehicles testbed. Based on the experiments on the V2V communications, the performance of forward collision avoidance under emergency events, which is a representative collaborative road safety application, is analysed. Interesting insights to the performance of V2V and the improvement of collision avoidance with V2V are obtained. The research works could be used for the analysis of connected vehicles impact on other collaborative roads safety applications.