Improving communication-based intersection safety by cooperative relaying with joint decoding

Vehicular communications have a great potential to improve intersection safety and traffic efficiency. Achieving a high application performance is challenging due to the specific propagation conditions caused by buildings and obstacles found at urban intersections. Relying on the state-of-the-art solution for vehicular communication based on IEEE 802.11, we extend contention-based forwarding to distribute data packets via multiple paths and apply joint decoding on erroneous received data packets. We study the gain of cooperative relaying with joint decoding on the performance of collision avoidance applications in an intersection scenario. We could show that with our algorithm the awareness distance and reliability is increased up to 25m and 55 %, respectively, under poor channel conditions.