Wireless Vehicular Networking for Improving Safety in Transportation Cyber Physical Systems

There are over 250 million vehicles operating daily in the US highways and this number is increasing day by day. According to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), there were 32000 deaths yearly from vehicle accidents in 2012 in the US alone. Recent studies have shown that about “60% of collisions could be avoided if drivers had at least one half second advance warning.” Wireless communications over vehicular network could help to reduce excessive cost of traffic collisions and congestion as well as the number of deaths and injuries. Wireless communication could be used to forward upcoming traffic information in a timely manner by using Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) or Vehicle-to-Roadside (V2R) and Roadside-to-Vehicle (R2V) communications. Exiting information forwarding techniques such as radio or texting are not suitable for time critical information and they may distract the drivers. Our goal in this work is to develop an automatic information dissemination framework for vehicular ad hoc network. We will study the IEEE standard (802.11p/n) based communication techniques for wireless communication in vehicular ad hoc networks through simulations and prototype using highly specialized on-board wireless devices and apps that are available in CWiNs research lab (http://www.cwins.org) in the department of Electrical Engineering at Georgia Southern University