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 example. 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 simulation 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. Furthermore, 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 evaluations of other communication technologies.