Improving the Performance of Beacon Safety Message Dissemination in Vehicular Networks Using Kalman Filter Estimation

This paper proposed an estimation method based on Kalman filter to decrease the number of disseminated beacon safety messages in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs). The ultimate goal is to reduce the number of packet collisions which in turn results in fresher information to be available for vehicles. The proposed method is implemented in application layer and thus applicable to any MAC layer including IEEE 802.11p (the MAC of DSRC standard). In the proposed algorithm, each vehicle estimates its location ahead for several intervals and sends them out along with actual current position. During the time that estimated information is available, there are no fresh transmissions unless some estimation error is detected. Also adaptive parameters exist in the algorithm. Results of extensive simulation study show that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the QoS of the beacon safety application which leads to increasing safety level in vehicular networks.