Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) cooperative applications for advanced safety is becoming a reality. Many automotive manufactures are entering advanced research phases or even planning deployments of such applications in the near future. However, the success of most V2V applications requires full or near-full deployment of the DSRC devices in new and existing vehicles, which will take many years to accomplish. In the meantime, use of autonomous sensors in combination with V2V can augment this deployment transitional period. In this paper we propose a hybrid approach that uses autonomous sensors to rebroadcast information about unequipped neighboring vehicles. In addition to messages that a host vehicle sends about its own state (such as position, speed, and direction), additional sensing capabilities also allow sending information about neighboring vehicles. This information can be obtained from radars, cameras and other autonomous sensors. This paper presents an actual implementation and analysis of rebroadcasting information about the surrounding vehicles.
