An RSSI-Based Low-Power Vehicle-Approach Detection Technique to Alert a Pedestrian

Information about an approaching vehicle is helpful for pedestrians to avoid traffic accidents while most of the past studies related to collision avoidance systems have focused on alerting drivers and controlling vehicles. This paper proposes a technique to detect an approaching vehicle aiming at alerting a pedestrian by observing the variation of the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) of the repeatedly radiated beacons from a vehicle, called the alert beacons. A linear regression algorithm is first applied to RSSI samples. The decision about whether a vehicle is approaching or not is made by the Student’s t-test for the linear regression coefficient. A passive method, where the pedestrian’s device behaves only as a receiver, is first described. The neighbor-discovery-based (ND-based) method, in which the pedestrian’s device repeatedly broadcasts advertising beacons and the moving vehicle in the vicinity returns the alert beacon when it receives the advertising beacon, is then proposed to improve the detection performance as well as reduce the device’s energy consumption. The theoretical detection error rate under Rayleigh fading is derived. It is revealed that the proposed ND-based method achieves a lower detection error rate when compared with the passive method under the same delay.