Distributed cross layer duplicate address handling for safety critical VANET communication

Abstract Vehicular ad-hoc networks are in the wake of mass deployment within upcoming years. This dedicated kind of mobile ad-hoc networks in the automotive domain is of high interest to increase safety of driving. We find that prior approaches for duplicate address detection in such networks fail to cover significant use cases. Low available bandwidth and limited communication radius together with high node mobility lead to reduced presence of meta data, like routing tables. This, holds especially for non IP-based safety critical message exchange using dedicated VANET protocols. However, common address duplicate handing mechanisms rely on such meta data. We show that this can lead to failure of duplicate address detection for ETSI ITS and WAVE in safety critical use cases. This is caused by a variant of the well known hidden station problem. To overcome this weakness, we propose a cross layer aware duplicate address detection scheme in combination with active address change requests to resolve the duplicates. An evaluation within a simulation environment shows the feasibility of the approach.