Talking Cars: A Software-based Large-scale Intervehicular Testbed

This project was focused on applying Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) to highways safety. The scenario of use is as follows: when an accident occurs, involved vehicles equipped with WiFi or 802.11p wireless interfaces try to forward an alert message to all approaching cars. While a plethora of proposals exist to fulfill this task, we advanced significantly the state of the art by devising a new software mechanism that can optimally propagate alert messages to approaching vehicles, very fast and farthest away, under realistic propagation scenarios. We developed the software and carried out (Aug 2011) field trials on real highways in Los Angeles where in many cases alert messages reached vehicles that were at a distance of over 12 miles from the vehicle that sent the initial alert, only taking fractions of seconds. This has confirmed our initial finding that, adopting such mechanism, the number of vehicles involved in a pile-up can greatly be reduced.