V2V Wireless Communication Protocol for Rear-End Collision Avoidance on Highways

More than 23% of annual vehicle accidents are rear-end collisions, which provides an important test-case for enhanced collision avoidance approaches based on v2v wireless communications. In this work, we propose and study the impact of a 802.11 based multi-hop MAC protocol that propagates an emergency warning message (EWM) down a platoon of cars on a highway. The design objective is to ensure reception of this message with stringent (low) delay constraints so as to provide drivers with requisite available maneuver time (AMT) to avoid rear-end collision. We provide realistic simulation studies of protocol performance within ns-2 environment for various topology (1 lane and 3 lanes) and background traffic scenarios, as well as different protocol parameter settings, to highlight the potential of this approach for effective collision avoidance or mitigation.