Impact of Communication Reliability on a Cooperative Collision Warning System

This paper evaluates the effect of communication reliability on a cooperative collision warning system (CCWS). The CCWS estimates and communicates vehicle positions, and predicts and processes future trajectories for collision decision making. The feasibility of the system design has been demonstrated in previous work, and this paper focuses on the robustness and reliability of the system by analyzing the error propagation and its impact on detection performance. This paper uses the Kalman filter technique to statistically characterize the trajectory prediction error, incorporates communication-induced error as part of the prediction error, and then determines the probability of conflicts and the quality of detection performance. Results with experimental data are presented to demonstrate the reliability of the system.