Search Results

Driving through intersections can be potentially dangerous because nearly 23 percent of the total automotive related fatalities and almost 1 million injury-causing crashes occur at or within intersections every year [1]. The impact of traffic intersections on trip delays also leads to waste of human and natural resources. Our goal is to increase the safety and throughput of traffic intersections using co-operative driving. In earlier work [2], we have proposed a family of vehicular network protocols, which use Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) and Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) technologies to manage a vehicle's movement at intersections Specifically, we have provided a collision detection algorithm at intersections (CDAI) to avoid potential crashes at or near intersections and improve safety. We have shown that vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications can be used to significantly decrease the trip delays introduced by traffic lights and stop signs.

A substantial fraction of automotive collisions occur at intersections. Statistics collected by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) show that more than 2.8 million intersection-related crashes occur in the United States each year, with such crashes constituting more than 44 percent of all reported crashes [12]. In addition, there is a desire to increase throughput at intersections by reducing the delay introduced by stop signs and traffic signals. In the future, when dealing with autonomous vehicles, some form of co-operative driving is also necessary at intersections to address safety and throughput concerns. In this paper, we investigate the use of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications to enable the navigation of traffic intersections, to mitigate collision risks, and to increase intersection throughput significantly.