Improving Safety in the Next Generation Vehicle Network (NGVN)

Over 42,000 deaths have occurred on highways in the United States during calendar year 2002 [1]. One way to achieve a safe highway environment is using a communication system that allows all vehicles on the highway or road to share their data so they can warn each other about dangerous situations and plan for safe driving activities. One problem to be addressed in such a system is dividing the vehicles on the highway into groups-of-interest, where vehicles that may need cooperation among each other to perform safe driving maneuvers comprise a group-of-interest. This paper proposes a location matrix-based algorithm to define the peer space (group-of-interest); that is, vehicles on the highway are encapsulated in matrices, and all maneuvers are planned in a cellular fashion using the Dynamic Service Discovery (DSD) -based Jini protocol as an ad-hoc network communication protocol.