Enhancing Urban Road Safety: A 5G NR Model for Vulnerable Road Users Awareness

The widespread adoption of cellular networks has played an important role in the integration of road safety applications, capitalizing on the ubiquitous use of this technology by road users and its extensive market penetration. This paper presents the formulation of an analytical model to assess the awareness of vulnerable road users (VRU) defined as VRU Awareness Probability (VAP) achieved by vehicles communicating via 5G New Radio (NR) cellular vehicle-to-everything C-V2X networks at urban intersections. The main assumption in our model is that all VRU are connected to a 5G network. Our analytical model is designed to represent the dynamics of the 5G NR network operating in communication mode 2 in an urban intersection setting; we consider the influencing factors of signal propagation, such as obstacles created by buildings and realistic mobility patterns for vehicles and VRU based on SUMO traces. Our research shows that the proposed model exhibits high accuracy in intersection scenarios without buildings and maintains this efficiency in partially and highly obstructed scenarios, showing a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.0265 and 0.0309, respectively; using the fitted model as a baseline in the non-obstructed scenario. The efficiency of this model can facilitate the study of the impact of the implementation and development of road safety applications on the safety of VRU. This VRU-centered approach allows for evaluating VRU awareness in different traffic density contexts, communication network conditions, and architectures where safety applications can be deployed.