Assessing the Impact of Inter-Vehicle Communication Protocols on Road Traffic Safety

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) will change the experience of driving in the near future. Most applications will use wireless communication (cellular or ad-hoc) for being able to provide the required services. Usually performance evaluations of communication protocols are conducted with typical network metrics like delay, jitter, or goodput for ex-ample. However, in the context of ITS it has been shown that network metrics are not sufficient to evaluate vehicular safety applications. Therefore, we extended our existing sim-ulation framework Veins with a model that allows to simulate dangerous road traffic safety situations, i.e., we implemented a driver behavior model for intersection approaches. Further-more, we implemented an autonomous controller which tries to avoid crashes at intersections. We showcase the impact of different Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) protocols, although the intersection approach model and autonomous controller could be also employed to carry out safety evalua-tions of other communication technologies. 1