Towards Safer Roads: An Efficient VANET-based Pedestrian Protection Scheme

About 1.2 million people lose their lives on roads yearly due to accidents despite the emerging and uprising technology in contemporary vehicles. In addition, 4.4 million people were seriously injured and required medical attention in crashes last year. By employing Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communication between drivers and vulnerable road users, fewer casualties are likely to occur and roads are expected to be much safer. In this paper, we propose a lightweight scheme to protect vulnerable road users based on communication between smartphones and on-board units installed in vehicles. Initially, the signal strength is used to estimate the distance between vehicles and pedestrians and predict the occurrence of a collision. Since signal strength alone can result in false alarms, we propose a collision detection algorithm to confirm a collision. The algorithm is run on both sides; the drivers and vulnerable road users to give appropriate and real-time warnings of a potential accident/collision. Vehicles and road users exchange their Global Positioning System (GPS) locations using Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC). The algorithm constructs a vector representing the vehicle path and uses efficient and simple mathematical operations to determine if there is a possibility of collision or not. Our scheme contributes to the safety applications of vehicular ad hoc networks. Our experiment’s results confirm that the proposed scheme can effectively detect collisions with minimum computation overhead.