Safety-oriented communication in mobile networks for vehicles

• Accident statistics indicate that every year a large number of casualties and extensive property losses are recorded due to traffic accidents. Consequently, efforts are directed towards developing passive and active safety systems that help reducing the severity of crashes or prevent vehicles to collide with each other. Within the development of these systems, technologies such as sensor systems, computer vision and vehicular communication are considered of importance. Vehicular communication is defined as the exchange of data between vehicles, and is considered a key technology for traffic safety due to its ability to provide the vehicles with information that cannot be acquired using other means (e.g. radar and video systems). However, due to the current early stage in the development of in-vehicle safety systems, the applicability of communication for improving traffic safety is still an open issue. Furthermore, due to the specificity of the environment in which vehicles travel, the design of communication systems that provide an efficient exchange of safety-related data between vehicles poses a series of major technical challenges.In this thesis we focus on the development of a communication system that provides support for in-vehicle active safety systems such as collision warning and collision avoidance.We begin by studying the applicability of communication for supporting the development of effective active safety systems. Within our study, we investigate different safety aspects of traffic situations. For performing such investigations we develop ECAM, a temporal reasoning system for modeling and analyzing accident scenarios. This system gives us the possibility of analyzing relations between events that occur in traffic and their possible consequences. We use ECAM for analyzing the degree of accident prevention that can be achieved by applying crash countermeasures based on communication in specific traffic scenarios.By acknowledging the potential of communication for traffic safety, we further focus in the thesis on the design of a safety-oriented vehicular communication system. We propose a new solution for vehicular communication in the form of a distributed communication protocol that allows the vehicles to organize the network in an ad-hoc decentralized manner. For disseminating information, we develop an anonymous context-based broadcast protocol that requires the receivers to determine whether they are the intended destination of sent messages based on knowledge about their momentary situation in traffic. We further design a vehicular communication platform that provides an implementation framework for the communication system, and integrates it within a vehicle. Investigations of the communication performances, which evaluate metrics such as transmission delay, send errors, packet collisions and information filtering, indicate that the proposed vehicular communication system is able to provide a reliable and timely exchange of data between vehicles.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datavetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Sciences (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

vehicular communication

active safety systems

collision warning and avoidance

safety-related information

Computer science

Datavetenskap

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

lic (ämneskategori)