Coordinated Lane Changing Using V2V Communications

Lane changing behavior is one source of vehicle accidents on the road. Before changing to another lane, the driver needs to carefully assess the distances to surrounding vehicles. Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications provide an opportunity to make lane changing decisions more safe and efficient. Within a vehicular network, all connected vehicles are sharing drive information in real-time, which improves the vehicle's situational awareness regarding the surrounding traffic conditions. This paper presents two lane changing schemes for connected vehicles based on V2V communications. The proposed schemes use simple ACK to make sure the messages communicated during the lane changing process is reliable. Furthermore, the proposed schemes are evaluated by a custom-built VANET simulator created using the MATLAB Discrete-Event System environment. The simulation results prove that the proposed lane changing schemes not only guarantee the safety of lane changes but also improve the efficiency of road traffic.