Models and Performance of VANET based Emergency Braking

The network research community is working in the field of automotive to provide VANET based safety applications to reduce the number of accidents, deaths, injuries and loss of money. Several approaches are proposed and investigated in VANET literature, but in a completely network-oriented fashion. Most of them do not take into account application requirements and no one considers the dynamics of the vehicles. Moreover, message repropagation schemes are widely proposed without investigating their benefits and using very complicated approaches. This technical report, which is derived from the Master Thesis of Michele Segata, focuses on the Emergency Electronic Brake Lights (EEBL) safety application, meant to send warning messages in the case of an emergency brake, in particular performing a joint analysis of network requirements and provided application level benefits. The EEBL application is integrated within a Collaborative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) which uses network-provided information to automatically brake the car if the driver does not react to the warning. Moreover, an information aggregation scheme is proposed to analyze the benefits of repropagation together with the consequent increase of network load. This protocol is compared to a protocol without repropagation and to a rebroadcast protocol found in the literature (namely the weighted p-persistent rebroadcast). The scenario is a highway stretch in which a platoon of vehicles brake down to a complete stop. Simulations are performed using the NS_3 network simulation in which two mobility models have been embedded. The first one, which is called Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) emulates the behavior of a driver trying to reach a desired speed and braking when approaching vehicles in front. The second one (Minimizing Overall Braking Induced by Lane change (MOBIL)), instead, decides when a vehicle has to change lane in order to perform an overtake or optimize its path. The original simulator has been modified by - introducing real physical limits to naturally reproduce real crashes; - implementing a CACC; - implementing the driver reaction when a warning is received; - implementing different network protocols. The tests are performed in different situations, such as different number of lanes (one to five), different average speeds, different network protocols and different market penetration rates and they show that: - the adoption of this technology considerably decreases car accidents since the overall average maximum deceleration is reduced; - network load depends on application-level details, such as the implementation of the CACC; - VANET safety application can improve safety even with a partial market penetration rate; - message repropagation is important to reduce the risk of accidents when not all vehicles are equipped; - benefits are gained not only by equipped vehicles but also by unequipped ones

Design and Evaluation of a Traffic Safety System based on Vehicular Networks for the Next Generation of Intelligent Vehicles

La integración de las tecnologías de las telecomunicaciones en el sector del automóvil permitirá a los vehículos intercambiar información mediante Redes Vehiculares, ofreciendo numerosas posibilidades. Esta tesis se centra en la mejora de la seguridad vial y la reducción de la siniestralidad mediante Sistemas Inteligentes de Transporte (ITS). El primer paso consiste en obtener una difusión eficiente de los mensajes de advertencia sobre situaciones potencialmente peligrosas. Hemos desarrollado un marco para simular el intercambio de mensajes entre vehículos, utilizado para proponer esquemas eficientes de difusión. También demostramos que la disposición de las calles tiene gran influencia sobre la eficiencia del proceso. Nuestros algoritmos de difusión son parte de una arquitectura más amplia (e-NOTIFY) capaz de detectar accidentes de tráfico e informar a los servicios de emergencia. El desarrollo y evaluación de un prototipo demostró la viabilidad del sistema y cómo podría ayudar a reducir el número de víctimas en carretera

Robust Low-Cost Multiple Antenna Processing for V2V Communication

Cooperative V2V communication with frequent, periodic broadcast of messages between vehicles is a key enabler of applications that increase traffic safety and traffic efficiency on roads. Such broadcast V2V communication requires an antenna system with omnidirectional coverage, which is difficult to achieve using a single antenna element. For a mounted, omnidirectional antenna on a vehicle is distorted by the vehicle body, and exhibits a nonuniform directional pattern with low gain in certain directions. The thesis addresses this problem by developing schemes that employ multiple antennas (MAs) to achieve an effective radiation pattern with omnidirectional characteristics at both the transmit- and the receive-side. To ensure robust communication, the MA schemes are designed to minimize the burst error probability of several consecutive status messages in a scarce multipath environment with a dominant path between vehicles.First, at the receive-side, we develop a hybrid analog-digital antenna combiner. The analog part of the combiner is composed of low-cost analog combining networks (ACNs) of phase shifters that do not depend on channel stateinformation (CSI), while the digital part uses maximal ratio combining. We show that the optimal phase slopes of the analog part of the combiner (i.e., the phase slopes that minimize the burst error probability) are the same found under the optimization of a single ACN, which was done in earlier work. We then show how directional antennas can be employed in this context to achieve an effective omnidirectional radiation pattern of the antenna system that is robust in all directions of arrival of received signals.Secondly, at the transmit-side, we develop two low-cost analog MA schemes, an analog beamforming network (ABN) of phase shifters, and an antenna switching network (ASN), for the case when receivers employ the ACN or the hybrid combiner. Both schemes are shown to achieve an effective radiation pattern with improved omnidirectional characteristics at the transmit-side without relying on CSI.Thirdly, the schemes above were developed assuming that all vehicles broadcast their messages with the same fixed period. Therefore, we tackle the practical scenario when different vehicles use different and potentially varying broadcast periods. We show that the phase slopes of the MA schemes at the receiver and/or transmitter can be designed to support multiple broadcast periods.\ua0Lastly, the optimal phase slopes of the MA schemes were analytically derived under a worst-case propagation corresponding to a dominant path with an angle of departure, and an angle of arrival that are approximately non-varying over the time it takes to transmit and receive several packets. We relax this assumption and study the system performance under a time-varying dominant component instead. We derive a design rule that yields robust phase slopes that effectively mitigate the losses due to the time-variation of the dominant path

Situational Awareness Enhancement for Connected and Automated Vehicle Systems

Recent developments in the area of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) have boosted the interest in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs). While ITS is intended to resolve and mitigate serious traffic issues such as passenger and pedestrian fatalities, accidents, and traffic congestion; these goals are only achievable by vehicles that are fully aware of their situation and surroundings in real-time. Therefore, connected and automated vehicle systems heavily rely on communication technologies to create a real-time map of their surrounding environment and extend their range of situational awareness. In this dissertation, we propose novel approaches to enhance situational awareness, its applications, and effective sharing of information among vehicles.;The communication technology for CAVs is known as vehicle-to-everything (V2x) communication, in which vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) have been targeted for the first round of deployment based on dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) devices for vehicles and road-side transportation infrastructures. Wireless communication among these entities creates self-organizing networks, known as Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). Due to the mobile, rapidly changing, and intrinsically error-prone nature of VANETs, traditional network architectures are generally unsatisfactory to address VANETs fundamental performance requirements. Therefore, we first investigate imperfections of the vehicular communication channel and propose a new modeling scheme for large-scale and small-scale components of the communication channel in dense vehicular networks. Subsequently, we introduce an innovative method for a joint modeling of the situational awareness and networking components of CAVs in a single framework. Based on these two models, we propose a novel network-aware broadcast protocol for fast broadcasting of information over multiple hops to extend the range of situational awareness. Afterward, motivated by the most common and injury-prone pedestrian crash scenarios, we extend our work by proposing an end-to-end Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) framework to provide situational awareness and hazard detection for vulnerable road users. Finally, as humans are the most spontaneous and influential entity for transportation systems, we design a learning-based driver behavior model and integrate it into our situational awareness component. Consequently, higher accuracy of situational awareness and overall system performance are achieved by exchange of more useful information

Detecting Non-Line of Sight to Prevent Accidents in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

There are still many challenges in the field of VANETs that encouraged researchers to conduct further investigation in this field to meet these challenges. The issue pertaining to routing protocols such as delivering the warning messages to the vehicles facing Non-Line of Sight (NLOS) situations without causing the storm problem and channel contention, is regarded as a serious dilemma which is required to be tackled in VANET, especially in congested environments. This requires the designing of an efficient mechanism of routing protocol that can broadcast the warning messages from the emergency vehicles to the vehicles under NLOS, reducing the overhead and increasing the packet delivery ratio with a reduced time delay and channel utilisation. The main aim of this work is to develop the novel routing protocol for a high-density environment in VANET through utilisation of its high mobility features, aid of the sensors such as Global Positioning System (GPS) and Navigation System (NS). In this work, the cooperative approach has been used to develop the routing protocol called the Co-operative Volunteer Protocol (CVP), which uses volunteer vehicles to disseminate the warning message from the source to the target vehicle under NLOS issue; this also increases the packet delivery ratio, detection of NLOS and resolution of NLOS by delivering the warning message successfully to the vehicle under NLOS, thereby causing a direct impact on the reduction of collisions between vehicles in normal mode and emergency mode on the road near intersections or on highways. The cooperative approach adopted for warning message dissemination reduced the rebroadcast rate of messages, thereby decreasing significantly the storm issue and the channel contention. A novel architecture has been developed by utilising the concept of a Context-Aware System (CAS), which clarifies the OBU components and their interaction with each other in order to collect data and take the decisions based on the sensed circumstances. The proposed architecture has been divided into three main phases: sensing, processing and acting. The results obtained from the validation of the proposed CVP protocol using the simulator EstiNet under specific conditions and parameters showed that performance of the proposed protocol is better than that of the GRANT protocol with regard to several metrics such as packet delivery ratio, neighbourhood awareness, channel utilisation, overhead and latency. It is also successfully shown that the proposed CVP could detect the NLOS situation and solves it effectively and efficiently for both the intersection scenario in urban areas and the highway scenario

Rate-Adaptation Based Congestion Control for Vehicle Safety Communications

This thesis deals with the scalability of Vehicle Safety Communications (VSC), where vehicles exchange periodic status messages to support future driver assistance applications. We systematically develop a design methodology for congestion control in VSC and present a resulting protocol named PULSAR. While previous works typically focused on controlling channel load only, we thereby integrate a concept which allows the adaptation to operate within the limits defined by safety applications