Evaluation of 5GNR-based Cooperative Collision Avoidance (CoCA)

Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAV) can leverage both physical sensing and wireless communications to improve road safety and efficiency. While standalone perception is practically limited by the range of on-board sensors and/or by the presence of obstacles that prevent seeing through, collective perception indeed allows vehicles to exchange -and even beyond, to fuse- information related to the obstacles they detect independently. In this paper, by means of system-level simulations, we analyze the performance of Vehicle-to-Network (V2N) connectivity based on the 5th Generation - New Radio (5GNR) as a support to Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM), in the light of scalability concerns (as a function of the number of connected users). Focusing on a canonical centralized Cooperative Collision Avoidance (CoCA) use case, we assess the link reliability and the End-to-End latency of all the critical messages involved. Simulation results emphasize the potential of 5GNR connectivity to enable cooperative obstacles detection and thus accordingly, to improve vehicle’s/driver’s awareness (regarding distant vehicles, vulnerable road users, etc.).