Adaptive Beaconing Research Articles

Intelligent High-Awareness and Channel-Efficient Adaptive Beaconing Based on Density and Distribution for Vehicular Networks

In vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs), a beacon is a periodic message sent to nearby vehicles containing essential details like the sender’s vehicle ID, location, speed, and direction. Maintaining the freshness of this information without causing network congestion requires adaptive beaconing to adjust to changes in mobility and network density. Our research, based on extensive simulation experiments, identifies specific parameter sets optimal for adapting beaconing rates to different scenarios. From this analysis, we introduce a novel scheme called high-awareness and channel-efficient adaptive beaconing (HACEAB), employing fuzzy logic to adapt to various environments and conditions. Initially, the protocol gauges network density using an adaptive threshold function, followed by estimating the node spatial distribution through the quadrat statistic method to discern uniform distribution or clustering. Utilizing these data, the protocol adjusts beaconing rates via appropriate input parameters for the fuzzy logic system. Remarkably, HACEAB represents the first beaconing scheme capable of simultaneously adjusting to changes in network density and spatial distribution. Furthermore, the protocol enhances performance by adapting transmission power to fluctuations in node density and distribution. NS-3 simulations validate the efficacy of these improvements.

AFB-GPSR: Adaptive Beaconing Strategy Based on Fuzzy Logic Scheme for Geographical Routing in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET)

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), geographical routing provides a robust and scalable solution for the randomly distributed and unrestricted movement of nodes. Each node broadcasts beacon packets periodically to exchange its position with neighboring nodes. However, reliable beacons can negatively affect routing performance in dynamic environments, particularly when there is a sudden and rapid change in the nodes’ mobility. Therefore, this paper suggests an improved Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing Protocol, namely AFB-GPSR, to reduce routing overhead and increase network reliability by maintaining correct route selection. To this end, an adaptive beaconing strategy based on a fuzzy logic scheme (AFB) is utilized to choose more optimal routes for data forwarding. Instead of constant periodic beaconing, the AFB strategy can dynamically adjust beacon interval time with the variation of three network parameters: node speed, one-hop neighbors’ density, and link quality of nodes. The routing evaluation of the proposed protocol is carried out using OMNeT++ simulation experiments. The results show that the AFB strategy within the GPSR protocol can effectively reduce the routing overhead and improve the packet-delivery ratio, throughput, average end-to-end delay, and normalized routing load as compared to traditional routing protocols (AODV and GPSR with fixed beaconing). An enhancement of the packet-delivery ratio of up to 14% is achieved, and the routing cost is reduced by 35%. Moreover, the AFB-GPSR protocol exhibits good performance versus the state-of-the-art protocols in MANET.

LDAB-GPSR: Location PreDiction with Adaptive Beaconing – Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET), nodes are randomly distributed and move freely, and hence the network may face rapid and unexpected topological changes. In this paper, an improved greedy perimeter stateless routing protocol, called “LDAB-GPSR”, is proposed. LDAB-GPSR mainly focuses on maximizing the packet delivery ratio while minimizing the control overhead. In order to accomplish this, two techniques are introduced, the first one is the location prediction technique in which the greedy forwarding strategy is improved by choosing more stable routes for data forwarding. The second one is the adaptive beaconing technique in which the slow start algorithm is employed to adapt the beacon packet interval time based on the mobility of nodes and the data traffic load instead of using the periodic beaconing strategy. These two strategies together improve the overall performance of the GPSR routing protocol. The performance of the new proposed protocol is evaluated by carrying out several NS-2.35 simulation experiments. The simulation results show that LDAB-GPSR protocol outperforms the GPSR+Predict protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio, control traffic overhead, end to end delay, and throughput. The ratios of enhancement approaches 40%.

ABNT: Adaptive beaconing and neighbor timeout for geographical routing in UAV networks

ABNT: Adaptive beaconing and neighbor timeout for geographical routing in UAV networks

An energy-efficient adaptive beaconing rate management for pedestrian safety: A fuzzy logic-based approach

Pedestrian road-safety applications require geolocation data at high refresh rate. This is achieved through high rate beaconing of the data from the safety devices owned by road users to servers. The servers perform threat analysis and send alerts to road users in case of risk of collisions. However, when low-battery devices like smartphones are used for such applications, they drain their energy rapidly as high beaconing rate entails quick energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient fuzzy logic-based adaptive beaconing rate management system while keeping traffic crashes on pedestrians as low as possible. The fuzzy inference system predicts road accident risk levels of pedestrians which are finally used to decide beaconing rates. The prediction relies on factors related to the pedestrians, drivers, vehicles, roads, environments, etc. The risk prediction accuracy of the fuzzy logic-based system is evaluated by comparing its output with the risk level prediction algorithm that relies on minimum distance for information exchange to predict the likelihood of accidents. Results show that collision risk level prediction of the two methods is the same for more than 90% of accident records investigated. Energy-efficiency evaluation of the adaptive beaconing rate management depicts that, the battery life of a mobile device can be doubled in comparison with a method that uses a mismanaged high rate beaconing frequency. Additional evaluations portray that energy consumption of adaptive beaconing rate is affected by vehicle arrival rates and factors that affect traffic safety. Comparative analysis with state-of-the-art related works indicates that despite considering several collision risk-pulling factors ignored by other researchers, the proposed solution has negligible energy overhead.

Dynamic superframe adaptation using group-based media access control for handling traffic heterogeneity in wireless body area networks

Wireless body area network is a promising technology that brings healthcare to a new level of personalization. The applications of wireless body area network are not limited to healthcare monitoring applications but vastly used in entertainment applications. The applications are emerging at a fast pace and attract the attention of researchers. IEEE 802.15.6 provides a communication standard which specifies the physical layer and media access control layer operations for wireless body area networks. A fixed superframe structure is used for handling of heterogeneous traffics of wireless body area networks through pre-defined user priorities. This leads to inefficient use of superframe time duration because of fixed time phases for different types of data traffic. In this article, a novel group-based classification of traffic is introduced to avoid contention and inefficient use of superframe duration. A group-based media access control is developed to adjust the superframe duration according to high priority traffic whereas the rest of the traffic is controlled using node-based buffering. The experimental results showed that the proposed media access control outperformed adaptive beaconing medium access control and priority media access control, in terms of stability period, delay, throughput, transmission loss, and residual energy.

Towards Rear-End Collision Avoidance: Adaptive Beaconing for Connected Vehicles

Connected vehicles have been considered as an effective solution to enhance driving safety as they can be well aware of nearby environments by exchanging safety beacons periodically. However, under dynamic traffic conditions, especially for dense-vehicle scenarios, the naive beaconing scheme where vehicles broadcast beacons at a fixed rate with a fixed transmission power can cause severe channel congestion and thus degrade the beaconing reliability. In this paper, by considering the kinematic status and beaconing rate together, we study the rear-end collision risk and define a danger coefficient ρ to capture the danger threat of each vehicle being in the rear-end collision. In specific, we propose a fully distributed adaptive beacon control scheme, called ABC, which makes each vehicle actively adopt a minimal but sufficient beaconing rate to avoid the rear-end collision in dense scenarios based on individually estimated ρ. With ABC, vehicles can broadcast at the maximum beaconing rate when the channel medium resource is enough and meanwhile keep identifying whether the channel is congested. Once a congestion event is detected, an NP-hard distributed beacon rate adaptation (DBRA) problem is solved with a greedy heuristic algorithm, in which a vehicle with a higher ρ is assigned with a higher beaconing rate while keeping the total required beaconing demand lower than the channel capacity. We prove the heuristic algorithm's close proximity to the optimal result and thoroughly analyze the communication overhead of ABC scheme. By using Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO)-generated vehicular traces, we conduct extensive simulations to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed ABC scheme. Simulation results show that vehicles can adapt beaconing rates according to the driving safety demand, and the beaconing reliability can be guaranteed even under high-dense vehicle scenarios.

POSACC: Position-Accuracy Based Adaptive Beaconing Algorithm for Cooperative Vehicular Safety Systems

Cooperative vehicular safety systems are expected to revolutionize the driving experience by providing road safety applications based on incident detection. Two vital quality parameters for cooperative safety applications are the position accuracy and communication reliability of the status information. The receiver may take erroneous decisions if the received data does not correspond to the latest situation of the transmitter (e.g., position, velocity, and trajectory of the target vehicle). In this paper, we propose and evaluate a POSition-ACCuracy (POSACC) based adaptive beaconing algorithm for cooperative vehicular safety systems. POSACC integrates three different control mechanisms to guarantee specific performance metrics. It adopts the position accuracy and communication reliability as the highest priority metrics, due to their direct impact on the vehicle's systems capability to avoid potential traffic accidents in real-time. In addition, it guarantees the priority metrics, maintaining the vehicle's warning distance, channel load, and end-to-end latency into the operative range of cooperative safety applications. POSACC is compared with three different state-of-the-art adaptive beaconing algorithms; ETSI DMG, LIMERIC, and DC-BTR&P. Extensive evaluation results show that POSACC successfully controls the beacon rate, transmission power, and the size of the minimum contention window. Simulation results also demonstrate that POSACC is more effective than the benchmark algorithms by guaranteeing the operational requirements of cooperative safety applications in a wider range of traffic situations.

Beacon inter-reception time based adaptive beaconing (BIRA) for congestion-aware vehicular networks

The vehicular networks heavily rely on beaconing for traffic safety and congestion awareness. These periodic broadcasted safety messages may lead to heavy data traffic, resulting in excessive inaccuracy and failure of applications based on vehicular communication environments. With the help of data congestion control schemes,Vehicular networks can be made more reliable and effective. However, these approaches use time-average metrics while not consideringbeacon receptions temporal behavior. In order to resolve the congestion problem, we present a Beacon Inter-Reception time based Adaptive beaconing (BIRA) in this article. The comparative simulation results show that the proposed scheme BIRA is effective in congestion control in comparison with the similar class scheme.

Adaptive beaconing for RSU-based intersection assistance systems: Protocols analysis and enhancement

Current envisaged cooperative vehicular applications require moderate to severe requirements of reliability and latency according to their purpose. Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC)-based applications mainly rely on the periodic exchange of information that under certain circumstances may cause congestion problems on the communication channel obtaining unreliable and outdated information at application level. Adaptive beaconing protocols adapt transmission parameters to different criteria such as the channel load and application requirements to improve the overall performance of the vehicle network. Nevertheless, it has not been determined yet if the information disseminated by these protocols is suitable enough for the implementation of specific applications, e.g., Road Side Unit (RSU)-based Intersection Assistance Systems (IAS) like Intersection Collision Risk Warning (ICRW). In this context, we first analyze the network behavior in a realistic simulated intersection area where probability of packet reception becomes difficult to predict and models become highly complex. In that scenario, we present a critical analysis on the performance of current EU and US decentralized congestion control protocols while their performance is evaluated with respect to tracking accuracies required by Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications. Results obtained lead us to conclude that adaptation criteria of beaconing protocols is not able to support different safety applications at the same time, that is, there is a tradeoff in the selection of such criteria between enhancing applications supporting vehicles or infrastructure. In that sense, we discuss and provide novel adaptation criteria (Intersection Assistance State Machine, IASM) to improve the performance of beaconing protocols towards assisting safety RSU-based IAS. Finally, we propose and validate through simulations a novel beaconing protocol (Intersection Assistance Protocol, IAP) that improves performance over studied protocols.

Estimation of Neighbors Position privacy scheme with an Adaptive Beaconing approach for location privacy in VANETs

In this work, we consider the issue of designing a location privacy scheme that preserve the Quality of Service (QoS) of the road safety applications. We propose a privacy mechanism, denoted Estimation of Neighbors Position privacy scheme with an Adaptive Beaconing approach (ENeP-AB), in which the change of pseudonym is based on the number of neighbors and their predicted positions. Then, we show that the Adaptive Beaconing approach, used to manage efficiently the wireless channel and to provide reliable vehicular communications, guarantees the same performances in terms of location privacy as well as the radio silence technique. Hence, the proposed privacy scheme is extended with an Adaptive Beaconing approach, called Extended Adaptive Beaconing Rate Protocol (E-ABRP). Our simulations demonstrate clearly that the beaconing rate approaches create a confusion in location and time where the change of pseudonym occurs while improving the quality of safety applications.

La-CTP: Loop-Aware Routing for Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks.

In emerging energy-harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSN), the sensor nodes can harvest environmental energy to drive their operation, releasing the user’s burden in terms of frequent battery replacement, and even enabling perpetual sensing systems. In EH-WSN applications, usually, the node in energy-harvesting or recharging state has to stop working until it completes the energy replenishment. However, such temporary departures of recharging nodes severely impact the packet routing, and one immediate result is the routing loop problem. Controlling loops in connectivity-intermittent EH-WSN in an efficient way is a big challenge in practice, and so far, users still lack of effective and practicable routing protocols with loop handling. Based on the Collection Tree Protocol (CTP) widely used in traditional wireless sensor networks, this paper proposes a loop-aware routing protocol for real-world EH-WSNs, called La-CTP, which involves a new parent updating metric and a proactive, adaptive beaconing scheme to effectively suppress the occurrence of loops and unlock unavoidable loops, respectively. We constructed a 100-node testbed to evaluate La-CTP, and the experimental results showed its efficacy and efficiency.

Adaptive Beaconing Based MAC Protocol for Sensor Based Wearable System

A sensor-based wearable system is a promising platform to monitor the health and movement of human in real time to improve the quality of life. However, it places stringent requirements on communication delay, energy efficiency, and throughput. In this paper, an adaptive beaconing medium access control (AB-MAC) protocol is proposed to reduce communication delay and improve throughput and energy efficiency for duty cycle-based wearable system. AB-MAC protocol belongs to receiver initiated (RI) MAC protocol, where the sender keeps listening the channel to send data while the receiver sends beacons actively for the preparation of receiving data when it becomes awake. AB-MAC protocol exploits the unbalance energy consumption in the network, where the nodes near the sink (or hub) consume more energy than that of nodes far away from the hub. AB-MAC protocol makes efficient use of the remaining energy of the nodes far away from the hub to send more beacons during the sleep time, which can decrease the sleep delay and improves the energy efficiency and throughput. In addition, the number of beacons that can be sent for the nodes is also obtained based on the remaining energy level. The theoretical analysis is conducted for analyzing the performance of AB-MAC protocol. Furthermore, experimental results are provided, which demonstrate that compared with RI-MAC protocol, AB-MAC protocol can reduce the delay by 32%–51%, increase the throughput by 45%–116%, and improve the energy efficiency by 12%–21% without sacrificing the network lifetime.

Adaptive beaconing for collision avoidance and tracking accuracy in vehicular networks

In vehicular networks, the exchange of beacons among neighboring vehicles is a promising solution to guarantee a vehicle’s safety. However, frequent beaconing under high vehicle density conditions will cause beacon collisions, which are harmful to a vehicle’s driving safety and the location tracking accuracy. We propose an ABIwRC (Adaptive Beaconing Interval with Resource Coordination) method for a highway scenario. Each vehicle broadcasts beacon interval requests, including the intervals needed for both the vehicle’s driving safety and location tracking accuracy. The RSU(Road Side Unit) allocates resources for a vehicle’s beaconing according to the requests from all vehicles and the interference relationship between the vehicles in adjacent RSUs. We formulate a resource allocation problem for maximizing the sum utility, which measures the satisfaction of vehicles’ requests. We then transform the optimization problem into a maximum weighted independent set problem, and propose an algorithm to solve this efficiently. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the benchmark in terms of beacon reception ratio, vehicle driving safety, and location tracking accuracy.

Adaptive Beaconing for Effective Inter-Vehicle Collision Avoidance System

Cooperative awareness among vehicles is required to make driving safer. Inter-vehicle communication is achieved by beaconing in the vicinity of the respective vehicles. The beaconing includes the exchange of periodic messages on each vehicle’s status information. The shorter the period of the beacon message transmission is, the higher the status information accuracy is. Accordingly, driving is safer. However, frequent exchanges of the periodic beacon cause wireless channel congestion and packet loss. To address the trade-off problem between the accuracy of information and the channel load, this paper presents a scheme to determine the optimum beacon interval for guaranteeing fundamental accuracy, while maintaining a moderate load on the communication channel. A performance evaluation using a computer simulation showed that the proposed scheme guarantees sufficient information accuracy for effectively avoiding inter-vehicle collisions and information overload. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is compatible with, and can be directly applied to, the current vehicular ad hoc network system implementation.

Adaptive Beaconing in Mobility Aware Clustering Based MAC Protocol for Safety Message Dissemination in VANET

Majority of research contributions in wireless access in vehicular environment (WAVE)/IEEE 802.11p standard focus on life critical safety-related applications. These applications require regular status update of vehicle’s position referred to as beaconing. Periodic beaconing in vehicle to vehicle communication leads to severe network congestion in the communication channel. The condition worsens under high vehicular density where it impacts reliability and upper bound latency of safety messages. In this paper, WAVE compliant enhancement to the existing IEEE 802.11p protocol is presented which targets prioritized delivery of safety messages while simultaneously provisioning the dissemination of nonsafety messages. Proposed scheme relies on dynamic generation of beacons to mitigate channel congestion and inefficient bandwidth utilization by reducing transmission frequency of beacons. Through the use of clustering mechanism, different beaconing frequencies and different data transmission rates are assigned to prioritize vehicular mobility. Through extensive simulation results, the performance of the proposed approach is evaluated in terms of a wide range of quality of service (QoS) parameters for two different transmission ranges. Results show that the proposed protocol provides significant enhancement and stability of the clustered topology in vehicular ad hoc network over existing standard and other protocols with similar applications.

Enabling Situation Awareness at Intersections for IVC Congestion Control Mechanisms

An Intersection Assistance System aim to assist road users in avoiding collisions at intersections, either by warning the driver or by triggering automated actions. Such a system can be realized based on passive scanning only (e.g., using LiDAR) or supported by active Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC). The main reason to use Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) is its ability to provide situation awareness even when a possible crash candidate is not yet in visual range. The IVC research community has identified beaconing, i.e., one-hop broadcast, as the primary communication primitive for vehicular safety applications. Recently, adaptive beaconing approaches have been studied and different congestion control mechanisms have been proposed to cope with the diverse demands of vehicular networks. In this paper, we show that current state-of-the-art congestion control mechanisms are not able to support IAS adequately. Specifically, current approaches fail due to their inherent fairness postulation, i.e., they lack fine grained prioritization. We propose a solution that extends congestion control mechanisms by allowing temporary exceptions for vehicles in dangerous situations, that is, situation-based rate adaptation. We show the applicability for two state-of-the-art congestion control mechanisms, namely Transmit Rate Control (TRC) and Dynamic Beaconing (DynB), in two different vehicular environments, rural and downtown.

Adaptive Beaconing Approaches for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: A Survey

Vehicular communication requires vehicles to self-organize through the exchange of periodic beacons. Recent analysis on beaconing indicates that the standards for beaconing restrict the desired performance of vehicular applications. This situation can be attributed to the quality of the available transmission medium, persistent change in the traffic situation and the inability of standards to cope with application requirements. To this end, this paper is motivated by the classifications and capability evaluations of existing adaptive beaconing approaches. To begin with, we explore the anatomy and the performance requirements of beaconing. Then, the beaconing design is analyzed to introduce a design-based beaconing taxonomy. A survey of the state-of-the-art is conducted with an emphasis on the salient features of the beaconing approaches. We also evaluate the capabilities of beaconing approaches using several key parameters. A comparison among beaconing approaches is presented, which is based on the architectural and implementation characteristics. The paper concludes by discussing open challenges in the field.

Distributed and Fair Beaconing Rate Adaptation for Congestion Control in Vehicular Networks

Cooperative inter-vehicular applications rely on the exchange of broadcast single-hop status messages among vehicles, called beacons. The aggregated load on the wireless channel due to periodic beacons can prevent the transmission of other types of messages, what is called channel congestion due to beaconing activity. In this paper we approach the problem of controlling the beaconing rate on each vehicle by modeling it as a Network Utility Maximization (NUM) problem. This allows us to formally apply the notion of fairness of a beaconing rate allocation in vehicular networks and to control the trade-off between efficiency and fairness. The NUM methodology provides a rigorous framework to design a broad family of simple and decentralized algorithms, with proved convergence guarantees to a fair allocation solution. In this context, we focus exclusively in beaconing rate control and propose the Fair Adaptive Beaconing Rate for Intervehicular Communications (FABRIC) algorithm, which uses a particular scaled gradient projection algorithm to solve the dual of the NUM problem. The desired fairness notion in the allocation can be established with an algorithm parameter. Simulation results validate our approach and show that FABRIC converges to fair rate allocations in multi-hop and dynamic scenarios.

Toward Communication Strategies for Platooning: Simulative and Experimental Evaluation

Platooning, which is the idea of cars autonomously following their leaders to form a road train, has huge potential to improve traffic flow efficiency and, most importantly, road traffic safety. Wireless communication is a fundamental building block: It is needed to manage and maintain the platoons. To keep the system stable, strict constraints in terms of update frequency and communication reliability must be met. We investigate different communication strategies by explicitly taking into account the requirements of the controller, exploiting synchronized communication slots, and transmit power adaptation. As a baseline, we compared the proposed approaches to two state-of-the-art adaptive beaconing protocols that have been designed for cooperative awareness applications, namely, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Decentralized Congestion Control (DCC) and Dynamic Beaconing (DynB). Our simulation models have been parameterized and validated by means of real-world experiments. Our results demonstrate that the combination of synchronized communication slots with transmit power adaptation is perfectly suited for cooperative driving applications, even on very crowded freeway scenarios.