A Performance Study of Inter-Vehicle Communication Protocols for Collision Warning System

Collision Warning Systems (CWS) can help reduce the probability and severity of car accidents by providing some sort of appropriate warning to the driver through Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC). Especially, the CWS can help avoid collision at intersections where traffic accidents are frequent (Study Group for Promotion of ASV; Traffic Bureau, 2007). A vehicle equipped with the CWS periodically broadcasts its information, and the CWS on other vehicles use the received information to alert drivers, helping them become aware of the existence of other vehicles. To avoid collision, the CWS has concrete objectives of IVC, i.e., the CWS should receive useful information accurately and in time. Many IVC protocols including our previously proposed relay control protocol (Motegi, et al., 2006) have been developed and evaluated through traditional metrics. However, instead of using such traditional metrics directly, many requirements of the intersection CWS must be considered to judge the feasibility and practicability of IVC protocols. This paper shows performance evaluation of our previous IVC protocol developed for CWS. To study the behavior of IVC protocols, we first describe a simulation methodology including performance metrics by means of reliable and timely communications. We then use such metrics to compare our IVC protocol with the flooding protocol in large-scale simulated networks. The simulation results show that our previously proposed protocol is a good candidate for real implementation because it passes all requirements of the intersection CWS.