  The rapid growth of traffic-related fatalities and injuries around the world
including developed countries has drawn researchers' attention for conducting
research on automated highway systems to improve road safety over the past few
years. In addition, fuel expenses due to traffic congestion in the U.S.
translate to billions of dollars annually. These issues are motivating
researchers across many disciplines to develop strategies to implement
automation in transportation. The advent of connected-vehicle (CV) technology
has added a new dimension to the research. The CV technology allows a vehicle
to communicate with roadside infrastructure (vehicle-to-infrastructure), and
other vehicles (vehicle-to-vehicle) on roads wirelessly using dedicated
short-range communication (DSRC) protocol. Collectively, the vehicle-to-vehicle
(V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication technologies are known
as V2X technology. Automotive companies have started to include On-Board Units
(OBUs) on latest automobiles which can run safety-critical and assistive
applications using V2X technology. For example, US Department of Transportation
has already launched various applications including but not limited to
lane-change assistance, collision avoidance, SPaT for emergency and transit
vehicles. Merge conflicts, especially when vehicles are trying to merge from
ramps to freeways, are a significant source of collisions, traffic congestion
and fuel use. This paper describes a novel freeway merge assistance system
utilizing V2X technology with the help of the DSRC protocol. The freeway merge
assistance system uses an innovative three-way handshaking protocol and
provides advisories to drivers to guide the merging sequence.
