View article

Vehicle and pedestrian collisions often result in fatality to the vulnerable road users, indicating a strong need of technologies to protect such vulnerable road users. Wireless communications have potential to support road safety by enabling road users to exchange information. In contrast to vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications for avoidance of inter-vehicle collisions, very limited efforts are made on communication mechanisms for pedestrian safety. This paper addresses the issue in a concrete way. We first formulate the requirement of the minimum information exchange distance for providing road users to have the necessary amount of time to perceive the situation and react. We then report our field tests and measurement based analysis to investigate if a Wi-Fi system can satisfy the application requirement. We also introduce a pedestrian protection application, V2ProVu, which …