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.