An analytical approach to the estimation of vehicular communication reliability for intersection control applications

Abstract

Connected and automated vehicles bring the capability to generate traffic data for intersection control applications. Unfortunately, for various reasons, such as signal blocking and interference, vehicles may experience communication failures leading to inefficiencies, e.g., unnecessarily long waiting queues, increased noise and greenhouse gas emissions or increased delays of emergency vehicles at intersections resulting in lower life-saving rates. This paper proposes an analytical approach to estimate vehicular communication reliability for road intersection control applications. The road segment in front of the intersection is divided dynamically into two areas. Due to the physical proximity to the roadside unit, the adjacent area is assumed to have more reliable communication than the more distant area. Consequently, the information about the approaching traffic in the more distant area is deduced from received communication in both areas. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulation experiments. First, we evaluate the communication reliability estimator by prediction accuracy metrics. Second, we study the benefits of the deployment of this estimator for emergency vehicle preemption. Our results provide evidence that the estimator has the potential to improve the performance of intersection control applications.