Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Road-Side Sensor Communication for Enhanced Road Safety

The authors propose a hybrid ITS safety architecture that combines vehicle-to-vehicle communication and vehicle-to-roadside sensor communication. Opposed to dedicated roadside units, which require major investments for purchase, installation and maintenance, roadside wireless sensor and networking technology represents a cost-effective solution and can leverage the deployment of the system as a whole. Among the various services of the hybrid communication system, the paper introduces accident prevention and post-accident investigation. They present a system and protocol architecture with a fully distributed concept for efficient and secure storage of sensor data. For deployment, this architecture will likely be combined with an alternative approach using dedicated roadside units as a centralized network element for communication and data storage.