Improving Driving Safety Based on Safe Distance Design in Vehicular Sensor Networks

We proposed a Critical Safe Distance (CSD) model in V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle) communication systems. By elaborately analyzing the vehicular movement features for car following, we proposed a CSD definition which well balances the requirement between driving safety and traffic throughput efficiency. Different from the time-headway and traditional braking models, our model fully takes the relative movement status of the front and back cars into consideration and derives a CSD which is more practical and effective. We also explore the needed CSD during lane changing for multilane case. Numerical results show that our proposed model could provide reasonable safe distance settings under different movement scenarios, which has the capability of avoiding collisions and improving traffic throughput at the same time. © 2012 Chen Chen et al.