Toward an Effective Risk-Conscious and Collaborative Vehicular Collision Avoidance System

In this paper, we introduce a cooperative collision-avoidance (CCA) scheme for intelligent transport systems. Unlike contemporary strategies, the envisioned scheme avoids flooding the considered vehicular network with high volumes of emergency messages upon accidental events. We present a cluster-based organization of the target vehicles. The cluster is based upon several criteria, which define the movement of the vehicles, namely, the directional bearing and relative velocity of each vehicle, as well as the inter-vehicular distance. We also design a risk-aware medium-access control (MAC) protocol to increase the responsiveness of the proposed CCA scheme. According to the order of each vehicle in its corresponding cluster, an emergency level is associated with the vehicle that signifies the risk of encountering a potential emergency scenario. To swiftly circulate the emergency notifications to collocated vehicles to mitigate the risk of chain collisions, the medium-access delay of each vehicle is set as a function of its emergency level. Due to its twofold contributions, i.e., the cluster-based and risk-conscious approaches, our adopted strategy is referred to as the cluster-based risk-aware CCA (C-RACCA) scheme. The performance of the C-RACCA system is verified through mathematical analyses and computer simulations, whose results clearly verify its effectiveness in mitigating collision risks of the vehicles arising from accidental hazards.