Cooperative Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

The major objective of this subproject is to improve situation evaluation in vehicular application scenarios through vehicle-to-vehicle communication by exchanging relevant information between vehicles. Therefore sensor data (e.g. position, velocity and driving direction) has to be disseminated and exchanged suitably, so each vehicle’s data basis is optimized to enable proper estimations. Based on the single data received, vehicles will perform a data fusion between own and foreign data, to provide a consolidated data basis for the planning or other components. Furthermore, additional information, particularly semantic information is used, e.g. from the navigation system, to further enhance the data basis. The data basis will be used by other components of the system, but also by our own message dissemination component, which will use the data for enhanced reliability and performance.

The focus is on vehicular applications that need cooperative interactions between vehicles to provide a proper situation evaluation. For example, it is not enough to detect traffic jam only based on the retrieved information from onboard sensors. Collaboration between vehicles is needed to detect the extents of a traffic jam. The detection mechanism itself will be provided by the decision engines of the other subprojects. Once a traffic jam has been detected, vehicles collaborate on disseminating this higher level information to other vehicles. Intelligent flooding mechanisms will reduce the network traffic, which is very important in this scenario. In a traffic jam, there are very large numbers of vehicles, which will detect the situation simultaneously. If each of these vehicles floods the network in an uncontrolled way, the radio channel will soon become unavailable due to collisions.

In a next step, the planning component can determine the available options for rerouting and choose the best option based on individual preferences of the driver. Depending on the stress level of the driver, multiple of these options may also be considered in a dialogue with the driver.