A peer-to-peer approach to vehicular communication for the support of traffic safety applications

More than half a million casualties are due to traffic accidents each year. Therefore, there is a high demand for innovative technologies focused on collision warning and collision avoidance. Among such technologies, the inter-vehicle communication and the vehicle-to-road communication are considered to have extensive potential for supporting the safety systems located within a vehicle. In this paper we propose a new approach to vehicular communication. We designed a safety-oriented vehicular communication, built around the concept of mobile ad-hoc peer-to-peer (P2P) networking. The merging between ad-hoc connectivity and P2P paradigm facilitates the development of a vehicular network characterized by self-organization, fault-tolerance, scalability, shareable resources and services, cooperation, cases of interconnection and cost efficiency. These characteristics recommend the communication proposed here as an efficient method for providing safety-relevant data for safety systems installed in vehicles.