A distributed, bandwidth-efficient accident prevention system for interurban VANETs

Road safety has become a main issue for governments and car manufacturers in the last twenty years. The concept of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is used when talking about communication technologies between vehicles and infrastructure to improve, among others, road safety. In this paper, we propose a warning service to prevent accidents by alerting drivers about accidents and dangerous road conditions. This service includes the definition of a new broadcast dissemination mechanism. A VANET highway scenario is simulated to evaluate how the use of safety schemes decreases the driver's reaction time when an unexpected situation occurs.