A lane-level cooperative collision avoidance system based on vehicular sensor networks

In this paper, we design and implement a lane-level cooperative collision avoidance (LCCA) system using vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The LCCA system applies vehicular sensor networks to preventing chain vehicle collisions, which allows vehicles with merely onboard sensors to prevent such collisions on the road because of sharp stops. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first CCA system that does not use inaccurate GPS locations and costly roadside infrastructures to avoid chain vehicle collisions. LCCA employs inter-vehicle communications and onboard sensing to form warning groups, where each warning group is a set of vehicles that drive along the same lane and every pair of adjacent cars is within a certain distance. Only single-hop transmissions are needed to join/leave a warning group, thus keeping the group maintenance overhead low. When a sudden braking is taken in a warning group, LCCA can quickly propagate warning messages among group members. This paper demonstrates our current prototype.