An Inter-operable and Multi-protocol V2X Collision Avoidance Service based on Edge Computing

In order to improve road safety, modern vehicles are equipped with smart sensors and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication technologies that facilitate the exchange of data (e.g., location, speed, road hazards) with other vehicles, the road infrastructure, and pedestrians, thus extending the range of perception beyond the capabilities of on-board sensors. All these data can be processed by a Collision Avoidance service deployed in a mobile edge computing (MEC) platform to guarantee low latency in the detection and localization of road hazards. In this paper, we propose a Collision Avoidance service based on Vanetza, an open-source ETSI ITS protocol stack, and demonstrate its operation using already developed experimental On-Board Units (OBUs) that communicate with the Collision Avoidance service over UDP and MQTT to exchange ETSI ITS messages encoded in ASN.1 and JSON format, respectively. We measure the application-level latency and we observe the benefit of our proposed approach in terms of latency reduction by a factor of 12 with respect to the literature.