Adaptive Multichannel Approach for Congestion Control in Vehicular Safety Communications

Growing number of vehicles on the road unavoidably leads to increasing amount of accidents. As a result, Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) has been proposed with the aim of preventing accidents and increasing road safety. Based on the currently proposed Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) technology for Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) standard, in the scenario with high vehicle density, WAVE system suffers from decreasing service performance especially for safety applications. This is due to the channel congestion condition. This paper proposes an adaptive multichannel approach, which allows flexible multichannel usage based on the current communication traffic condition. As a result, system performance in terms of average packet delay and throughput can be optimized as illustrated by our simulation results.