Smart Vehicular Networks for Reducing Road Accidents and Traffic Congestion

There is a growing need in vehicles today for a way to notify or update drivers on upcoming traffic and construction ahead of them, or to automatically slow down the vehicle when the vehicle ahead wrecks/breaks and the driver is too distracted to notice. With the increase in number of vehicles on the road, traffic accidents, and cost of driving, vehicular ad hoc network systems are becoming more needed every day. In the United States, one person dies every fifteen minutes due to vehicle collisions. By creating a vehicular communication system using Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and/or vehicle-to-road (V2R) side networking a reduction in lives lost could be reduced. After successful implementation of vehicular communications, drivers will receive upcoming traffic information in a timely manner, and drivers can make an educated decision to avoid traffic accidents and congestions. Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication systems can also assist in the reduction of collisions by creating an automatic cruise-control system that can monitor the speed of the car ahead of them, and reduce the vehicles speed to match when the vehicle ahead applies the breaks. Our research will focus on testing different wireless technologies on a small scale test bed to find the most applicable wireless system to use in vehicular communication for both V2V and V2R communications. Vehicular communication will be tested with different wireless technologies to see which system is best suited for high speed vehicular networks in terms of connection setup time and data rates. Furthermore, we will also evaluate the wireless technologies in terms of transmission range to find the most viable for the vehicular networks