Unreliable V2X communication in cooperative driving: Safety times for emergency braking

Cooperative driving is a promising paradigm to improve traffic efficiency and safety. In congested traffic scenarios, such cooperation allows for safe maneuvering and driving with small inter-vehicle spatial gaps. The vehicles involved coordinate their movements in real-time and continuously update each other about their maneuver execution status by means of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. However, unreliable V2X communication increases the Age of Information (AoI) of vehicles' status updates, posing a challenge in situations where emergency braking is required during cooperative maneuvering. To address the interplay between unreliable V2X communication and the resulting impact on traffic safety, we introduce a so-called safety time function, specifically designed for cooperative driving use-cases. The safety time function provides the time available for a vehicle to react to an unexpected event of another vehicle - such as emergency braking to avoid a collision. We provide a computationally efficient algorithm for the computation of safety time functions, which allows for efficient and safe cooperative maneuver planning - even in dense traffic scenarios with many vehicles involved. We show the applicability of our proposed safety time function based on the assessed communication quality for IEEE 802.11p-based V2X communication to meet safety constraints in dense vehicular traffic.