Joint space-division multiple access and adaptive rate control for basic safety messages in VANETs

In a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), basic safety messages (BSM) are exchanged among vehicles to provide cooperative awareness and support safety applications. While the periodic generation and transmission of such messages already place a heavy burden on the network load, the hidden nodes further complicate the network situation with packet collisions being undetectable. In this paper, we propose a space-division multiple access (SDMA) technique combined with an adaptive rate control mechanism to improve the efficiency of BSM transmissions. With SDMA to reduce the interference among the vehicles and address the hidden-node problem, only vehicles located sufficiently far apart are allowed to reuse the same time slot to send their BSMs. The developed SDMA approach permits multiple transmissions per road segment and uses Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) in each segment, giving rise to a much better use of both space and bandwidth. To guarantee that the actual number of BSM transmissions does not exceed the maximum allowable, we devise an adaptive scheme that optimally adjusts the individual packet generation rates in accordance to the vehicle density. Toward this end, we find an optimal bandwidth utilization that maximizes the newly-defined metric, termed as “safety throughput” per vehicle. Such an optimal utilization allows a large number of BSM packets to be generated while maintaining a high reception probability. Our comprehensive simulation results confirm the clear advantages of our proposal over the existing techniques, in terms of safety range, BSM packet inter-arrival time, and safety throughput.