Impact of LTE-V2X Connectivity on Global Occupancy Maps in a Cooperative Collision Avoidance (CoCA) System

Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) are expected to fulfill the needs of various emerging road safety applications. In this work, we focus on improving C-ITS vulnerable road users safety by considering a Cooperative Collision Avoidance (CoCA) system. In this system, vehicles rely on on-board sensors in order to generate local occupancy maps that are transmitted by means of LTE-V2X connectivity to a fusion center. The latter executes the fusion of successfully received local maps, in order to generate a global occupancy map, which can reveal obstacles that could not be perceived based uniquely on standalone vehicle's perception means. The resulting map is broadcast to all connected vehicles in transmission range (i.e., even those who have not contributed to the global map) in order to announce a risk of collision. The main objective of this work is to evaluate the impact of LTE-V2X connectivity performance on the fusion result and to define the best compromises between the communication configuration, the definition of occupancy maps and obstacle detection capabilities.