MC-Safe: Multi-channel Real-time V2V Communication for Enhancing Driving Safety

In a Vehicular Cyber Physical System (VCPS), ensuring the real-time delivery of safety messages is an important research problem for Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication. Unfortunately, existing work relies only on one or two pre-selected control channels for safety message communication, which can result in poor packet delivery and potential accident when the vehicle density is high. If all the available channels can be dynamically utilized when the control channel is having severe contention, then safety messages can have a much better chance to meet their real-time deadlines. In this article, we propose MC-Safe, a multi-channel V2V communication framework that monitors all the available channels and dynamically selects the best one for safety message transmission. During normal driving, MC-Safe monitors periodic beacons sent by other vehicles and estimates the communication delay on all the channels. Upon the detection of a potential accident, MC-Safe leverages a novel channel negotiation scheme that allows all the involved vehicles to work collaboratively, in a distributed manner, for identifying a communication channel that meets the delay requirement. MC-safe also features a novel coordinator selection algorithm that minimizes the delay of channel negotiation. Once a channel is selected, all the involved vehicles switch to the same selected channel for real-time communication with the least amount of interference. Our evaluation results both in simulation and on a hardware testbed with scaled cars show that MC-Safe outperforms existing single-channel solutions and other well-designed multi-channel baselines by having a 23.4% lower packet delay on average compared with other well-designed channel selection baselines.