Inter-vehicle communication of warning information: an experimental study Abdelhamid Mammeri 1 • Azzedine Boukerche 1 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 Abstract In this paper, we show experimentally the feasibility of intervehicle communication of warning information. Warning messages convey significant infor- mation that might improve the safety of drivers and pas- sengers. Intervehicle communication can be achieved by the detection of important events through a vision-based detection module, and sharing them between vehicles using a transmission module. In this paper, we developed a testbed that considers both modules in order to detect, recognize and share relevant information, such as traffic signs. To the best of our knowledge, our architecture is the first that combines detection and transmission of messages in the same platform. We detect traffic signs as blobs using the Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) algo- rithm, and we recognize them using Random forest clas- sifiers. In the transmission module, we used a simplied broadcasting mechanism that avoids the use of handshak- ing to establish a communication. In order to assess our system, a set of indoor and outdoor experiments are considered. Keywords Vehicular networks  Warning events detection and transmission  Traffic signs 1 Introduction With the fast advances of technology, there is a concerted determination to use Intervehicle communication systems to share comfort and warning messages between vehicles [6]. Comfort messages have low importance, because they carry superfluity information such as weather conditions, near-by stores, or entertainment locations. However, warning messages, known as safety messages, convey extremely important information, which might improve the safety level of passengers by exchanging relevant infor- mation between vehicles [2, 21]. Warning messages can be generated periodically, or based on a detected event (event- driven) [10, 15, 19, 21]. Periodic message are generated frequently within a predefined period of time, while event- driven messages are triggered when an imminent danger is encountered. Example of warning event-driven messages includes the detection, by a leading vehicle, of an emer- gency event occurring at short distances ahead. This event message, which can be harmful, is then shared between vehicles following the leading car and located within its transmission range. Forthcoming vehicles, after the recep- tion of warning messages, take appropriate decision to avoid multicar chain collision, for instance, [7, 5]. In order to develop architectures that can reliably detect emergency events and transmit them to upcoming vehicles in a short delay, both event detection and transmission should be considered simultaneously. In this paper, an Inter-Vehicle communication prototype that detects, encodes and sends warning information is developed. Our system is composed of a Vision Module which senses the event, an Interpretation Module that converts the detected image into an equivalent code, and a Transmission Module that shares the detected information with forthcoming vehicles. To the best of our knowledge, our architecture is & Abdelhamid Mammeri amammeri@uottawa.ca Azzedine Boukerche boukerch@site.uottawa.ca 1 University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada 123 Wireless Netw DOI 10.1007/s11276-016-1258-3