An early collision warning algorithm for vehicles based on V2V communication

The WAVE (IEEE 1609) standard and vehicular technology create a new opportunity for telematics service. Safety is one of the top issues of telematics service. In this paper, we propose a proactive safety method that can alert drivers before the accident occurs using WAVE. An algorithm named Early Collision Warning Algorithm (ECWA) was proposed in this paper. In ECWA, vehicles broadcast Relationship Information (RI) to neighboring vehicles periodically. Each vehicle calculates whether potential collisions may happen or not upon receiving RI messages. After calculation, ECWA sends warning messages to drivers if the collision will occur. ECWA allows drivers to set the warning level and warning distance by themselves. In our simulation, not only vehicles's collisions at an intersection were simulated but also the GPS error range was considered in our design. The results show that ECWA has good performance and can always alert drivers suitably if the GPS error range was small. Even though the GPS error range is large, ECWA also can enhance the hit rate of warning messages.