Beacon-based cooperative forwarding scheme for safety-related inter-vehicle communications

Abstract

Most safety-related applications targeting Inter-Vehicle Communications systems (IVC) rely on multi-hop broadcasts to disseminate safety-related information to all surrounding vehicles. However, these conventional broadcast schemes suffer from the so-called broadcast storm problem, a scenario in which contention and collisions happens a lot due to an excessive number of broadcast packets. In this paper, we propose a novel solution, referred to as the Beacon-based Cooperative Forwarding (BCF) scheme for fast and reliable propagation of safety message within a critical area. With the aid of periodic beacons, the proposed scheme specifies multiple appropriate forwarder candidates to broadcast the alert message before detecting a danger. Moreover, a cooperative forwarding scheme is also proposed to guarantee high reachability and to delay constraints. After realistic simulations, the BCF scheme demonstrated better performance than other contention-based schemes by reducing the end-to-end delay and message rebroadcasting ratio by over 30% while maintaining a high message reception rate.