Environment-Aware Communications for Cooperative Collision Avoidance Applications

Abstract

A promising application of cooperative driving is the exchange of safety-relevant time-critical information. With the support of communications, vehicles can improve safety by communicating the output of their advanced driver-assistance systems. The level of improvement is however very dependent on the instantaneous channel quality at the time of the information exchange. The configuration of the communication partners, but also the other vehicles, traffic signs and buildings that compose the surrounding dynamic environment, create strong time-varying multipath components. Existing measurement campaigns show that such components can bring positive and negative impacts on the communication link depending on the instantaneous properties of the surrounding environment. An emerging concept of vehicle sensor-aided communications has shown its potential to improve direct-link communication via utilizing information about the surrounding environment provided by vehicle sensors. In this paper we show that the sensor-aided predictive communications can improve the safety in cooperative emergency braking situations. The performance of this approach is evaluated in terms of application related metrics variation compared to various channel conditions: perfect, realistic vehicular channel model, and the blocked channel. Simulation results show that the proposed sensor-based approach significantly improves the emergency braking performance for both the head-on and rear-end collision scenarios.