Overtaking on rural roads often becomes dangerous when oncoming traffic is detected by the driver too late or its speed is underestimated. Up-to-date proposals for cooperative overtaking assistance systems rely either on the beaconing of status messages or on real-time video transmission. The beaconing-based system provides limited information to the driver about the upcoming traffic in the form of warnings. Introduction of the video-based system can extend the amount of driver information, thus, increasing the reliability of the assistance. However, when two platoons of vehicles are meeting each other, the quality of the video information can undergo significant degradation since a common multiple access communication channel is used. In this paper we demonstrate that the performance of a video-based overtaking assistant can be significantly improved if codec channel adaptation is undertaken by exploiting the information from the beacons about any forthcoming increase in the load of the multiple access channel used. The benefits of our approach are demonstrated in relation to the practical scenario of H.264/AVC video coding and IEEE 802.11p/WAVE inter-vehicle communication standards.
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