Context awareness beacon scheduling scheme for congestion control in vehicle to vehicle safety communication

Vehicle safety applications based on vehicle to vehicle communication typically transmit safety-related beacons to all neighboring vehicles with high reliability and a strict timeline. However, due to high vehicle mobility, dynamic network topology and limited network resource, this periodic beaconing could lead to congestion in the communication network. Therefore, beacon transmission method has a special challenge to efficiently use the limited network resources to satisfy the requirements of safety applications. With this motivation, we propose a novel distributed beacon scheduling scheme referred to as the context awareness beacon scheduling (CABS) which is based on spatial context information dynamically scheduling the beacon by means of TDMA-like transmission. The proposed beacon scheduling scheme was evaluated using different traffic scenarios within both a realistic channel model and IEEE 802.11p PHY/MAC model in our simulation. The simulation results showed that the performance of the CABS scheme was better than periodic scheduling in terms of packet delivery ratio and channel access delay. Also, the CABS scheme satisfies the requirements of the safety applications. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.