Situation Awareness and the Last Vehicle

The effectiveness of many DSRC-based applications is highly dependent on penetration.  Current efforts focus on quickly getting penetration rates to a suitable level to support an initial set of applications, however, at the other end of the deployment, we have the problem of getting the last car connected since some very valuable applications require 100% situational awareness. 100% connectivity will never happen since even when all vehicles are equipped, some of the systems will not be operational.  This submission outlines a method to identify and track non-communicating or “stealth" vehicles by sharing observations of the stealth vehicle signature from equipped vehicles. It also recognizes that there is some uncertainty in the knowledge of the local environment and proposes a probability-based situational awareness framework to explicitly take into account the uncertainty associated with both communicating and non-communicating vehicles.  In addition, this proposal reduces overall bandwidth requirements for the DSRC spectrum.