Predictive safety-aware transmit rate control scheme for a real-time proactive forward collision warning system

Forward collision warning systems in connected vehicles are crucial for improving road safety. These systems use V2X communication to frequently capture and broadcast potential rear-end crash risks, issuing warnings via beacon messages. However, V2X-based proactive forward collision warning systems face challenges due to channel congestion and delays between the occurrence of dangerous situations and the reception of warning messages. To address these challenges, this study proposes a predictive safety-aware transmit rate control scheme (PSA-TRC). This scheme predicts crash risk and adaptively adjusts each vehicle’s beaconing rate in a decentralized manner. Upon detecting channel congestion, the system activates a distributed beacon rate adaptation algorithm. This algorithm assigns higher beaconing rates to vehicles with greater predicted crash risk while maintaining the total beaconing demand within the channel’s capacity limits. We evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed PSA-TRC through comprehensive comparisons with benchmark schemes using real-world highway trajectory datasets. Our case study findings suggest that the PSA-TRC significantly enhances the reliability and efficiency of beaconing for proactive forward collision warning systems, especially in scenarios involving high vehicle density.