Enabling Safer Crosswalks with State-of-the-Art Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Technology

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication is a technology that enables vehicles to communicate with other vehicles (V2V), infrastructure (V2I), cyclists, and pedestrians (V2P). V2X employs antenna technology that allows omnidirectional wireless data transmission between all nodes in the transportation ecosystem. This has strong implications for improving pedestrian safety, reducing traffic congestion, and enabling smart city applications. One area where V2X can have a tremendous impact is at pedestrian crosswalks. Currently, these are dangerous zones where vehicle-pedestrian collisions occur frequently due to blind spots, distracted driving/walking, and unclear right-of-way. V2X aims to eliminate these collisions by allowing vehicles and pedestrian smartphones to continuously share their real-time locations, trajectories, and analytics. This seamless connectivity is enabled by V2X antennas embedded in cars and mobile devices. The primary goal of this research is to increase the safety of pedestrians on and near crosswalks positioned on roadways. The Altair FEKO 2022.1 software is used in this study to create a symmetrical V2X communication scenario with intersecting highways. Cars, pedestrians, roads, and traffic lights are arranged in the Altair WallMan Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software. The Shooting Bouncing Ray (SBR+) solver in Altair ProMan is computed on a CAD-modelled database to simulate the power received at key prediction points on crosswalks in the path of each vehicle. Intelligent Ray Tracing (IRT) is utilized to animate the scene with moving cars and pedestrians over a three-second time interval while simultaneously counting the number of propagation pathways and rays used at each instant. At each prediction time instant and for every prediction point, power received is measured in decibel-milliwatts (dBm). The computed simulation results are analysed at 5.8 GHz, 6 GHz, and 28 GHz.