Decentralized piggybacking-based dissemination of Cooperative Awareness Messages in vehicular ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication has shown great promise to improve road safety and traffic efficiency via the periodic broadcasting of Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs), in which traffic information could be exchanged among adjacent vehicles. Since each CAM contains local-observed traffic information such as geolocation, speed, and safety alerts, frequent CAM losses will decrease the reliability on avoiding crashes and injuries on the road. Existing solutions tend to recover the lost CAMs through either source-based re-transmission or neighbor-based forwarding, which may suffer from significant performance degradation due to the fast movement of vehicles and high dynamic network topology. In this paper, we develop a decentralized cooperative broadcasting protocol for CAM dissemination, where each vehicle can piggyback some received CAMs in its routine broadcasting to help others recover their lost CAMs. To promote cooperation of CAM piggybacking, a new data structure called bitmap is introduced to record the packet receiving status at each vehicle, based on which time slots could be allocated to vehicles with low data collisions, lost CAMs could be detected only using each vehicle’s local information, and the qualities of wireless links could be estimated dynamically. Then, we propose two piggybacking schemes, Benefit-based Piggybacking (BP) and Suggestion-based Piggybacking (SP), aiming to maximize the average CAM delivery ratio. We evaluate the proposed schemes in simulations with realistic vehicle mobility traces and channel models. Simulation results show that our bitmap-based lost CAM detection has superior performance than traditional request-based solutions. In comparison with forwarding-based schemes, our schemes can achieve much higher CAM broadcast reliability with short time delay and small communication overhead.