Collision Control of Periodic Safety Messages With Strict Messaging Frequency Requirements

For safety messages in a vehicular networking environment, strict messaging frequency requirements exist. For instance, six out of eight cooperative vehicular safety applications, as chosen by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Crash Avoidance Metrics Partnership, require a minimum of 10 Hz, whereas the precrash sensing application requires an even higher frequency of 50 Hz, for messages that convey the positions of vehicles. Currently, the collisions of periodic safety message broadcasts for the IEEE Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) system are left to the IEEE 802.11p medium access control (MAC) to resolve. With small contention window sizes stipulated in the 802.11p amendment, however, the MAC offers only limited relief to the collision problem, particularly toward the beginning of the control channel (CCH) interval. In this paper, we show that application-level control of the message transmission phase is desirable, when the frequency adaptation is not allowed due to the application requirement. We demonstrate through simulation and analysis that the proposed technique achieves up to 50% higher message reception probability compared with that relying only on the 802.11p MAC. The proposed method works in the safety applications themselves; therefore, the existing standards need not be modified.