Design and evaluation of V2X communication system for vehicle and pedestrian safety

Abstract As the vehicles gain the extensive popularity and increasing demand, traffic accident is one of the most serious problems faced by modern transportation system. Hereinto, crashes between cars and pedestrians cause plenty of injuries and even death. Diverting attention from walking to smartphones is one of the main reasons for pedestrians getting injured by vehicles. However, the traditional measures protecting pedestrians from the vehicles heavily rely on the sound warning method, which do not capable for pedestrians focusing on the smartphones. As the smartphones become ubiquitous and intelligent, they have the capacity to provide alert for the pedestrians with the help of vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communication. In this paper, an efficient vehicle-to-X (V2X) communication system is designed for the vehicle and pedestrian communication to guarantee the safety of people. It achieves the IEEE 802.11p and the WiFi protocols meanwhile on the on-board unit (OBU) designed for vehicles. Extensive evaluation shows that the OBU can provide the reliable communication for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and V2P in terms of packet delivery rate and average delay. Furthermore, two safety applications have been developed to protect the safety of vehicles and pedestrians based on the data transferred from the OBU. The first application is designed to show the driving information and provide the collision forewarning alert on the tablet within the vehicle. The second application is developed for the smartphone to provide forewarning alert information to the smartphone-distracted vulnerable pedestrians. Smartphone states are appreciable to provide the adaptive alert modes. Experimental results show that these applications are capable of alerting the intersection accidents, and the pedestrians can get the adaptive alerts according to smartphone usage contexts.