A vehicular network based intelligent lane change assistance protocol for highways

Drivers change the lane over the road networks is a common seen practice when they face a slow, stopped or broken vehicle. Sometimes they have to change the lane to take the next exist or the next U-turn towards their targeted destination. Changing the lane requires that the driver should be aware of vehicles behind him on the new lane or vehicles intending to change to the same lane during that period of time. If any of these vehicles are located on the blind-spot or if the driver miss-expect that vehicle's location or speed, his attempt of changing the lane can be failed or on some scenarios this may lead to an accident. On highways this type of accident can be fatal due to the high speed vehicles which do not allow drivers to stop the severity situation. This paper presents an Intelligent LAne CHange assistant protocol (ILACH) for highway road scenario. This protocol assists drivers to change the lane safely and efficiently. Several scenarios are considered where a certain driver attempts to change the lane. From the experimental results we can see that the proposed protocol enhances the safety and the efficiency of the tested scenarios.