Relay Selection for Heterogeneous Transmission Powers in Connected Vehicles

Abstract

It is widely believed that the advances of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications will help to remodel the prospect of road transportation systems. By virtue of V2V communications, information generated by the vehicle control system, on-board sensors or passengers can be effectively disseminated among vehicles in proximity, or to vehicles in multiple hops away in a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET). Without assistance from any built infrastructure, a variety of active road safety applications (e.g., Vehicle-Based Road Condition Warning, Cooperative Collision Warning, Approaching Emergency Vehicle Warning) and traffic efficiency management applications (e.g., Wrong Way Driver Warning) are enabled by inter-vehicle wireless links. The purpose of connecting vehicle technologies is to improve road safety, awareness, and transportation systems efficiency.

The Wireless Access for Vehicular Environments (WAVE) technology/Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) is the main enabling wireless technology for both V2V and vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications. From USDOT and stakeholders detailed analysis, it is resolved that WAVE is the only viable option for critical safety and other low latency mobility and environmental applications. WAVE technology has reached to a mature stage and a basic V2V system is expected to be deployed in the next few years. In the late part of 2015, USDOT announce that WAVE is sufficiently robust to proceed with the preparation for deployment of connected vehicle environments. The USDOT has created a roadmap with preliminary plans to guide industries and public agencies implementation efforts. However, there are persisting major concerns regarding the V2V initiative needing more analysis and testing. One of the concerns is the channel congestion. Channel congestion may impact WAVE effectiveness, which may in turn impact the effectiveness of supported safety applications. Suggested solutions to mitigate congestion are focused on supporting adaptive control of the message transmission power. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) have included transmit power component per packet to be used for channel congestion control mechanism. The adjustment of transmission powers has created an environment of vehicles with different transmission powers. Such environment will affect the performance of the proposed protocols to disseminate warning messages. It may also affect the performance of periodic beaconing that is required by most of the safety applications. Thus far, several protocols have been proposed to help identify appropriate relay vehicles. However, such approaches neglect the fact that vehicle transmission ranges are typically heterogeneous due to different transmission power values or dynamic adjustment of power to alleviate congestion. The proper selection of relay nodes governs high delivery ratio, acceptable overall end-to-end delay and efficient bandwidth usage. In this work, area-based relay selection protocols that work in heterogeneous transmission powers are introduced. Mathematical functions are developed for a timer and decision probability to be used by each vehicle receiving the message. The values of the two functions allow the vehicle to determine if it is the next to act as relay node or not. Geometric taxonomy for all possible overlap patterns in wireless environment is constructed with the related math calculations. Moreover, an adaptive expiry time for neighbours-table entries that harmonizes with dynamic beacon scheduling is proposed.