Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: How to Show the Impact on Traffic Safety?

Vehicular ad hoc networks, in which vehicles directly exchange information through wireless communication, promise to increase transport efficiency and traffic safety. In this paper we address the challenge of demonstrating the beneficial impact of vehicular ad hoc networks on traffic safety via simulation. We provide a blueprint for such a simulation experiment. The required building blocks discussed in this paper comprise accident modeling, safety metrics, design of an accident prevention application (APA) based on vehicular networks, and a model of the performance of the communication system. We then focus on the aspect of how an APA can be designed and formalized with the help of Markov reward processes, and show that the model is mathematically ´well-behaving´. The APA will allow us in the future to assess a communication system´s performance with respect to traffic safety.