An Efficient Freeway Driving Assistance Protocol in Vehicular Networks

Freeways have been known over decades as high-speed multi-lane roads, where the opposite traffic directions are completely separated. No intersections, pedestrians, or bicycles are expected on these road scenarios, besides specific ramps are designed to facilitate the entrance and exit of vehicles. Although freeway driving is considered safer and faster for experienced drivers, it can be more demanding and difficult for fresh or exhausted ones. Entering and existing the freeway road are considered the most critical situations where the driver needs to achieve high synchronizations with the surrounding traffic there. In this work, we introduce a freeway driving assistance protocol for drivers aiming to reduce the difficulties for fresh drivers and enhance the safety and efficiency conditions over the freeway road scenarios. This proposed protocol can also be used by the autonomous vehicles where no drivers control the vehicle. We evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol using several simulated driving scenarios. It shows a good performance in terms of increasing the safety of traffic and smoothing the traffic speed of vehicles.