Enabling Cross-Technology Communication to Protect Vulnerable Road Users

Current research in Cooperative Intelligent Transport System (C-ITS) is focusing mostly on improving the performance of the link layer technology utilized to enable communication between cars or on methods to make traffic more efficient and, most important, safer. Less attention is instead devoted to non-motorized road users such as pedestrians or cyclists which are often addressed as Vulnerable Road Users, or VRUs. In fact, while today it is fair to assume that the vast majority of VRUs are equipped with a smartphones or in general with devices with wireless connectivity, we cannot also assume that such devices are compatible with the variant of the 802.11 standard employed in C-ITS applications known as 802.11p. This is a significant gap in that it prevents critical safety services available to vehicular road users to be extended also to VRUs. In this paper we propose an edge computing-based approach capable of enabling interoperability between 802.11p networks and standard Wi-Fi networks. A technique known as Beacon stuffing is utilized to forward such messages to the VRU's mobile devices without requiring them to be associated to any network. The proposed system can be easily integrated into off-the-shelf mobile phones and tablets without requiring any root access to the device. We prototype and test the proposed system over the Smart-highway Testbed deployed in Antwerp, Belgium.