Cluster-Based Beaconing Process for VANET

doi:10.1016/j.vehcom.2015.03.001

Vehicular Communications

Volume 2, Issue 2, April 2015, Pages 80-94

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vehcom.2015.03.001 Get rights and content

Abstract

In this paper we introduce the Cluster-Based Beacon Dissemination Process (CB-BDP) that aims to provide vehicles with a local vehicle proximity map of their vicinity. Based on this map, safety applications can be used for accident prevention by informing drivers about evolving hazardous situations. The CB-BDP is designed under the two following objectives. First, since it is used for safety applications, we want the map to be detailed and accurate as much as possible. Second, we want the map to be coordinated with nearby vehicles, thereby allowing synchronized and coordinated reactions of nearby vehicles to evolving hazardous situations. We design a cluster based aggregation–dissemination beaconing process that uses an optimized topology to distribute the vehicle proximity map. The topology is adaptive and robust in order to meet the challenging VANET conditions. An accurate and detailed map results in a heavy load of beacon messages. Our proposed scheme deals with this problem by integrating a contention-free medium access control (MAC) strategy for reliable communication.

Introduction

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a promising branch of traditional MANET. VANET is designed to provide wireless communication between vehicles and between vehicles and nearby roadside equipment. This communication intends to improve both safety and comfort on the road. The majority of VANET applications require the availability of real-time position information. Some of VANET applications, such as Adaptive Cruise Control and Cooperative Intersection Safety, require a certain degree of positioning accuracy in order to be able to function properly. For new research tendencies and state-of-the-art of VANETs see [36], [37], [38]. Critical safety applications though, such as the Vehicle Collision Warning and the Cooperative Awareness applications, which enhance the driver's perception and knowledge of the road and the environment, require very precise and reliable localization system. The acceptable localization error in these applications is with a meter in order to estimate accurately the distances between vehicles and between vehicles and objects.

The US FCC has allocated 75 MHz of the spectrum in the 5.9 GHz band for Direct Short Range Communication (DSRC). The DSRC spectrum is divided into seven 10 MHz channels. One of these seven channels is designated as a control channel, and is used primarily for safety related applications. There are two types of traffic safety-related communication that circulate on the control channel: the event-driven messages that are sent whenever a hazard situation has been detected and the periodic beacon messages by which vehicles announce their current status information – such as position, speed, steering – to nearby vehicles. Those beacon messages are a key component of safety applications by providing vehicles with a broad and accurate vehicle proximity map [1], [2] of their surroundings. Based on this map, safety applications – usually referred to as Cooperative Awareness applications – can be used for accident prevention by informing drivers about evolving hazardous situations.

The dissemination processes of event-driven messages and beacon messages have distinct objectives and characteristics. Event-driven messages on the one hand are triggered only at detection of an emergency situation, and therefore, are not expected to cause significant load on the channel. However, once a hazardous situation is detected, an emergency message must be distributed in the complete dissemination area with high reliability and short delay. Beacon messages on the other hand have a more relaxed deadline requirement, but are expected to cause the significant load on the channel.

In this paper we introduce the Cluster-Based Beacon Dissemination Process (CB-BDP). This process aims to provide vehicles with such vehicle proximity map of their vicinity. The CB-BDP is designed with two objectives in mind. First, since the vehicle proximity map is used for safety applications, we want the map to be broad and as accurate as possible. Second, we want the map to be coordinated with vehicles located nearby. This coordination is required for the synchronized and cooperative reaction of nearby vehicles to evolving hazardous situations. However, such an accurate estimation in a dynamic environment requires a high transmission frequency of beacon messages from numerous nearby vehicles, which in turn, results in a high data load on the channel. Moreover, coordinating a map in a lossy channel is challenging because proximity information may be received by some vehicles and not received by others.

To address these challenges, we suggest replacing the traditional multipoint-to-multipoint transmissions of beacon messages with a cluster-based aggregation–dissemination process. In this way, nearby vehicles share a coordinated map of their vicinity. To deal with the high load of beacon messages, we introduce a contention-free Medium Access Control (MAC) scheme intended to grant the CB-BDP with efficient and reliable spatial bandwidth reuse.

The first step to achieve this goal is to integrate cluster-based MAC [3], [4] into our scheme. In cluster-based MAC, the channel access of cluster members is synchronized in order to provide contention-free channel access within the cluster. Furthermore, cluster-based MAC can provide bandwidth efficiency by bandwidth reuse among clusters. However, for reliable bandwidth reuse the resulting inter-cluster interference needs to be reduced.

In order to deal with this inter-cluster interference, we propose to combine cluster-based MAC with inter-cluster colouring scheme used to synchronize channel access between adjacent clusters. The cluster colouring is used by the CB-BDP to mitigate the inter-cluster interference by providing two levels of bandwidth reuse. The first level is a complete inter-cluster bandwidth reuse at which bandwidth is reallocated among all clusters. The inter-cluster colouring is used to reduce the inter-cluster interference by synchronizing concurrent transmissions taking place in adjacent clusters according to a fair Signal-to-Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) optimization criterion. The second level is less efficient but more reliable bandwidth reuse. In this case, the cluster colouring enables highly reliable transmission by silencing not only transmitter cluster members but also members of the two adjacent clusters.

This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we present related work. The system model is described in Section 3. In Section 4 we present the Cluster-Based Beacon Dissemination Process. Section 5 illustrates simulation results of CB-BDP. Discussion (incorporating RSUs) and conclusions are provided in Sections 6 and 7.

Section snippets

Related work

The IEEE 802.11p standard, designed for wireless access in the vehicular environment (WAVE) uses the CSMA/CA as its MAC method, despite the fact that it is suffering from the following well-known problems. First, when considering broadcast transmission, RTS (Request-To-Send)/CTS (Clear-To-Send) mechanism is infeasible. In such case, the CSMA provides no means to solve the hidden station problem, which in a heavy traffic load can lead to a high rate of packet collisions. Second, the CSMA can

System model

In this work we consider a distributed beacon dissemination process based on Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication in changing dynamic environments such as highway and suburban scenarios. Accordingly, we leave the discussion about beaconing process around intersection junction out of the scope of this paper. This is because beaconing process on intersection is distinctive in terms of both objectives and challenges. On intersection, RSUs will be deployed in order to enable safe traffic merging

The Cluster-Based Beacon Dissemination Process

The Cluster-Based Beacon Dissemination Process (CB-BDP) is designed to provide vehicles with a broad, accurate, and coordinated vehicle proximity map of their vicinity. To achieve this, the CB-BDP applies the following three-phase process. In the first phase, beacons in the same cluster are aggregated by clusterheads using the intra-cluster aggregation protocol. The key objective of this protocol is to provide each cluster member with access to a time bounded, contention-free channel on which

Simulation modelling and setup

The goal of this simulation study is to analyse the CB-BDP performance. We assume that all vehicles are equipped with a wireless communication device. The evaluation of the proposed CB-BDP scheme was done with a Matlab-based simulator that combines a microscopic road traffic simulation with a communication simulation.

The highway traffic model that is used in this simulation is based on the microscopic model developed by Krauss et al. [29] designed for multilane traffic flow dynamics. In this

Discussion

In this work we suggested a beaconing process designed to provide each vehicle in the network a detailed, accurate and coordinate vehicle proximity map of its surrounding area. The focus of this work is the scenario of dense network configuration expected in the late deployment phase of VANET technology. The main challenge in this scenario is addressing the high load of beacon messages required to create the desired map under the dynamic vehicular environment. In order to deal with the high

Conclusions and future work

In this paper we have introduced the Cluster-Based Beacon Dissemination Process designed to provide vehicles with a real-time and coordinated vehicle proximity map of their vicinity. Based on this map, safety applications can be used for accident prevention by informing drivers about evolving hazardous situations. The real-time and coordinated map enables synchronized and coordinated reactions of nearby vehicles to the evolving situations. In [20] we proposed a clustering scheme that produces

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The goal of self-adaptive routing is to make the novel technology to enhance its connectivity globally, whereas applying any services and paths. Nonetheless, in an event where the communication amid each cluster occurs, then a reactive transmission protocol will be initiated [6–9]. Geographically based transmission protocols or rather the location-based transmission protocols link up the data point using the topological understanding of the real road map and the general surroundings.
The destination aware context-based routing scheme is recommended to consider different frameworks in the formation of clusters, direction of motors, location of motors, speed of vehicles, destination of vehicles and interest lists of vehicles. The idea of the link number and the motor mobility is utilized for the cluster creation and the selection of the cluster heads. In the formation of these clusters, the motors are considered with an extreme connectivity degree that fundamentally create the VANETs surroundings, which are designed for leadership purposes. Therefore, leadership takes part in the election of cluster heads and effective organization of the clusters that use the aggregated relative speed of the motors in leadership. The main work is focused on this paper is the destination-aware context-centered on the routing framework applied with urban VANET environment and divides into intra and inter-cluster communication to enhance the general packet-delivery ration hence minimizing the delays seen during delivery.
Detecting Bogus Information Attack in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network: A Context-Aware Approach
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In [14], a polling scheme is used for reliable broadcasting for safety applications in VANETs. A cluster based beaconing process for VANETs is proposed in [15]. Authors in [16] modeled and enhanced service access in VANETs with dual radio devices.
This paper proposes a Triggered CCHI Multichannel MAC protocol for efficient safety message dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. The proposed protocol allows a vehicle to start control channel interval (CCHI) by terminating service channel interval (SCHI) whenever a safety message arrives during SCHI. It enhances the performance of VANET by reducing resource wastage and unwanted delay caused by fixed interval of CCHI and SCHI. Further, CCHI keeps on increasing until all safety messages are not transmitted. A virtual TDMA beaconing process is also proposed in this paper to ensure delivery of periodic status messages. Multichannel hidden terminal problem is also addressed using cluster member request and cluster head request. An analytical model is developed to evaluate the proposed protocol with respect to packet delivery ratio, throughput, safety message delay and packet loss ratio. Extensive simulation is carried out to validate the analytical model and to demonstrate the improvement in comparison to existing similar MAC protocols and IEEE802.11p.
SEGM: A Secure Group Management Framework in Integrated VANET-Cellular Networks
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To cope with these shortcomings, Benslimane et al. [12] propose a VANET-3G integrated network architecture and defines the concept of mobile gateways. In addition, to achieve some of the benefits of an infrastructure-based network without the need for physical infrastructure, researchers have investigated the idea of clustering in VANETs, whereby a hierarchical network structure forms in a distributed manner throughout the network via some sort of clustering algorithm [13]. A VANET clustering algorithm works by associating vehicles into groups, according to some rule set, and selecting a vehicle known as the cluster head (CH) to mediate between the cluster and the rest of the network in much the same way as a wireless access point.
Recently, the envisioned integration between vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) and cellular network can accommodate rich applications since integrated VANET-Cellular network enables mobile operators to provide vehicle users with seamless data access to the operators' services. In integrated VANET-Cellular networks, the clustering algorithms associating vehicles into groups can provide high performance data transmission service and have been widely studied. However, in most of the existing literature, the security issues in such a scenario cannot be taken into full consideration, which may decrease the reliability of the system, mainly including: 1) How to efficiently and securely set up and maintain a group; and 2) How to perform the secure group access management. For this end, we propose a secure group management framework in integrated VANET-Cellular networks, which consists of two schemes, i.e., SEGM-I and SEGM-II. SEGM-I is proposed for the fixed trusted member scenario, and SEGM-II is designed for a general case, i.e., dynamic untrusted member scenario. The SEGM can be divided into two phases: group setup and maintenance phase, and group access authentication phase. During group setup and maintenance phase, SEGM-II can dynamically maintain the group by using contributory group key agreement, supporting group joining, group leaving, group merging, and group partition. During group access authentication phase, we propose a lightweight group access authentication protocol based on message authentication code (MAC) aggregation technique with DoS attacks resistance. The proposed SEGM is communication-efficient and secure against hostile eavesdroppers as well as various other attacks specific to group settings. Finally, performance evaluations demonstrate its efficiency in terms of group management and access authentication overhead.
A mobility-based scheme for dynamic clustering in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs)
2017, Vehicular Communications
Citation Excerpt :
CH only chooses its CMs from the local vicinities. Vehicle information is broadcasted through periodic beacon messages [9]. Lowest-ID [7] is a clustering algorithm originally proposed for MANETs.
Vehicle clustering is an efficient approach to improve the scalability of networking protocols in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). However, some characteristics, like highly dynamic topology and intermittent connections, may affect the performance of the clustering. Establishing and maintaining stable clusters is becoming one of big challenging issues in VANETs. Recent years' researches prove that mobility metric based clustering schemes show better performance in improving cluster stability. Mobility metrics, including moving direction, vehicle density, relative velocity and relative distance, etc., are more suitable for VANETs instead of the received radio strength (RSS) and identifier number metrics, which are applied for MANETs clustering. In this paper, a new dynamic mobility-based and stability-based clustering scheme is introduced for urban city scenario. The proposed scheme applies vehicle's moving direction, relative position and link lifetime estimation. We compared the performance of our scheme with Lowest-ID and the most recent and the most cited clustering algorithm VMaSC in terms of cluster head duration, cluster member duration, number of clusters, cluster head change rate and number of state changes. The extensive simulation results showed that our proposed scheme shows a better stability performance.

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Cluster-Based Beaconing Process for VANET

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Related work

System model

The Cluster-Based Beacon Dissemination Process

Simulation modelling and setup

Discussion

Conclusions and future work

TrafficView: traffic data dissemination using car-to-car communication

Mob. Comput. Commun. Rev.

Cluster-based medium access scheme for VANETs

Clustering-based multichannel MAC protocols for QoS provisionings over vehicular ad hoc networks

IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol.

Balancing broadcast reliability and transmission range in VANETs

Evaluation of the IEEE 802.11 p MAC method for vehicle-to-vehicle communication

Intervehicle transmission rate control for cooperative active safety system

J. Intell. Transp. Syst.

LIMERIC: a linear adaptive message rate algorithm for DSRC congestion control

IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol.

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication: fair transmit power control for safety-critical information

IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol.

Adapting the wireless carrier sensing for VANETs

Adaptive communication scheme for cooperative active safety system

Beaconing approaches in vehicular ad hoc networks: a survey

Wirel. Pers. Commun.

Space division multiple access (SDMA) for robust ad hoc vehicle communication networks

On the ability of the 802.11 p MAC method and STDMA to support real-time vehicle-to-vehicle communications

EURASIP J. Wirel. Commun. Netw.

Clustering-based multichannel MAC protocols for QoS provisionings over vehicular ad hoc networks

IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol.

SDMA: On the suitability for VANET

A cross layered mac and clustering scheme for efficient broadcast in VANETs

TDMA cluster-based MAC for VANETs (TC-MAC)

Secure vehicular communication systems: design and architecture

IEEE Commun. Mag.