Cooperative V2X-Based UAV Detection in Rural Transportation Corridors

Rural transportation corridors remain weakly instrumented for continuous low-altitude airspace monitoring. At the same time, Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) roadside units (RSUs) are increasingly deployed for transportation safety services. This work investigates whether existing RSUs can be extended with passive, cooperative RF sensing to detect small UAVs without modifying standards-compliant ITS communications in the protected 5.9 GHz band. A calibrated simulation study evaluates corridor-scale operation under realistic propagation conditions, including terrain masking and narrowband interference. All results reported in this paper are derived from simulation and do not include field measurements or hardware prototyping. False alarm performance under diverse ISM emitters is not quantified. The results show that cooperative processing across neighboring RSUs improves epoch-level verified detection coverage compared with single-RSU sensing. Bearing variability is reduced for weak or partially masked signals. These gains result from feature-level validation across spatially separated receivers rather than deterministic signal combining. RF calibration constrains detections to physically plausible kilometer-scale ranges. The resulting angular accuracy is sufficient for early warning and track initiation, but not for precise localization. Overall, the findings indicate that existing V2X infrastructure can support supplementary early warning capability for corridor-scale airspace monitoring while preserving primary V2X safety functions.