A VANET Solution to Prevent Car Accidents

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are regarded as the adequate solution to cooperative driving between communicating cars on the road. There are strong economical interests in this field since vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication allows to improve traffic safety, to improve route planning, or to control traffic congestion. The 802.11p is a draft amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard for vehicular communications. It has been adopted by Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE), which defines an architecture to support Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). In this work we present a driver warning system in which damaged vehicles send warning messages and the rest of the vehicles make the diffusion of these messages. We concentrated on diffusion of warning messages sent by damaged nodes in order to inform the rest of vehicles in the scenario in 802.11p-based VANETs. The target is to send vehicle safety messages with high reliability and low delay. We performed a sensibility study to evaluate the impact of varying some parameters in the proposed advertisement system. We show that the propagation delay is lower when node density increases and that the percentage of blind nodes (i.e., nodes that do not receive these packets) highly depends on this factor. Finally, the results demonstrated that, to obtain the lowest possible propagation delay in our system, the best solution is that messages have different priorities depending on their characteristics. Keywords—vehicular ad hoc networks, performance evaluation, inter-vehicle communication.