Vehicle-to-vehicle safety messaging in DSRC

Abstract

This paper studies the design of layer-2 protocols for a vehicle to send safety messages to other vehicles. The target is to send vehicle safety messages with high reliability and low delay. The communication is one-to-many, local, and geo-significant. The vehicular communication network is ad-hoc, highly mobile, and with large numbers of contending nodes. The messages are very short, have a brief useful lifetime, but must be received with high probability. For this environment, this paper explores the efficacy of rapid repetition of broadcast messages. This paper proposes several random access protocols for medium access control. The protocols are compatible with the Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) multi-channel architecture. Analytical bounds on performance of the proposed protocols are derived. Simulations are conducted to assess the reception reliability and channel usage of the protocols. The sensitivity of the protocol performance is evaluated under various offered traffic and vehicular traffic flows. The results show our approach is feasible for vehicle safety messages in DSRC.