VCAST: Scalable Dissemination of Vehicular Information with Distance-Sensitive Precision

V Kulathumani,Y P Fallah,R A Moparthi

doi:10.1155/2013/586193

Abstract

Real-time information about the state (location, speed, and direction) of other vehicles in the system is critical for both safety and navigation applications in future intelligent transportation systems. However, reliably obtaining this information over multiple hops in a capacity constrained, contention-prone wireless network poses a significant challenge. In this paper, we describe an algorithm VCAST that addresses this challenge by exploiting a notion of distance sensitivity in information propagation, in which information is forwarded at a rate that decreases linearly with distance from the source. By doing so, the required communication overhead per node can be significantly reduced, thereby reducing channel contention, allowing higher information supply rates, and scaling to larger network sizes. VCAST can be used to improve safety against collisions and to enable dynamic routing and navigation techniques by providing aggregate traffic information in an extended neighborhood. The performance of VCAST is validated using extensive ns-3 simulations under different network sizes and densities with an IEEE 802.11b transmission model and the advantages of VCAST in comparison to non-distance-sensitive approaches are highlighted.

Highlights

Infrastructureless, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) wireless communication is expected to be the basis for both safety and navigation applications in future intelligent transportation systems [1, 2]
The results of our evaluation show that, by using distancesensitive forwarding, VCAST is able to scale to larger network sizes as well as support much higher broadcast rates compared to non-distance-sensitive techniques
Our experimental results show that by using distance-sensitive forwarding, VCAST is able to scale to larger network size as well as support much higher broadcast rates compared to non-distance-sensitive techniques

Summary

Introduction

Infrastructureless, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) wireless communication is expected to be the basis for both safety and navigation applications in future intelligent transportation systems [1, 2]. Existing broadcast techniques for vehicular safety systems have primarily focused on balancing transmission rate and communication range to maximize the reliability of single hop wireless communication In such an approach information about other vehicles is available only when intervehicular distance is too small which may not be enough to avert a collision [4] or to provide a timely reroute in the presence of traffic congestion. By forwarding traffic information over multiple communication hops, we expect several advantages: (1) vehicle location over a vicinity will be available even if the communication range is extremely low because of high density, improving vehicular safety, (2) information about approaching emergency vehicles will be available, (3) information about lane changing and merging vehicles will be available even if they are outside a single communication range, and (4) information about road blocks, accidents, and impending congestion will be available from several miles ahead, permitting higher level applications that dynamically re-route based on this information.

Related Work

System Description

Analysis

Performance

Conclusions