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.