Evaluation of Congestion-Enabled Forwarding With Mixed Data Traffic in Vehicular Communications

Abstract

ITS-G5 is a communication system for vehicle-to-everything communication for road safety and traffic efficiency applications. On the lower layers, it is based on IEEE 802.11 standard and uses a simple ad hoc mode with a random medium access control scheme. Ad hoc networking is realized by a geographical routing scheme that provides single- and multi-hop communication over ITS-G5 links for periodic and event-driven broadcast messages. Specifically, contention-based forwarding ( CBF ) allows for efficient and reliable multi-hop packet transport by overhearing and timer-based transmission control. To cope with the channel congestion, decentralized congestion control (DCC) adjusts the message rate and ensures that the network load keeps below a predefined threshold of the bandwidth. To enforce a node’s message rate, a “ Gatekeeper” above the MAC and beneath CBF is added. Under high network load, this Gatekeeper introduces an additional queuing delay seen by CBF , which can cause its overhearing function to fail. This contribution studies multi-hop forwarding in the context of DCC with the Gatekeeper and LIMERIC as a rate adaptation algorithm. We propose a congestion-enabled forwarding scheme that, in comparison to existing approaches considering DCC and forwarding separately, restores the efficient operation of CBF , and improves the communication performance in terms of reliability and latency for mixed data traffic composed of single- and multi-hop packets with different priorities. The simulations show the performance improvements in a freeway scenario. An analysis assesses the boundary conditions for CBF and the Gatekeeper. Moreover, the analysis corroborates the simulation.