Challenges and Initial Measurements on Communication and Localization for Mountain Bike Safety Applications

As of today, research in vulnerable road users (VRUs) applications is mainly focused on safety in urban road scenarios. There is little to be found in the literature with respect to VRUs in mountain areas, where mountain biking and hiking also present risks of collision. Here, it is not yet clear whether existing localization and communication technologies would provide sufficient performance in such harsh environments. In this work, we start answering this question by presenting the results of a measurement campaign which took place in a mountain area in Northern Italy during Summer 2024. With respect to localization, we show that global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based localization alone often provides unreliable results due to vegetation and terrain. Trilateration with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and beacons mounted at fixed positions performs well in some circumstances and can be used to enhance GNSS, however, we also observed many unclear effects that require further investigations. Concerning communication, the results indicate that both direct short range communications (DSRC) and cellular V2X (C-V2X) works fairly well in most cases, but terrain characteristics might induce packet losses or low signal quality, whereas instabilities in GNSS fixes might also cause C-V2X outages.

I. Introduction and Related Work

The research on safety applications for vulnerable road users (VRUs) is growing rapidly. The motivation is pretty simple, as VRUs have high chances to get seriously injured or to die in road traffic accidents. Statistics shows that VRUs account for 46% of fatalities and 53% of serious injuries in the EU [1].