Dissemination of Safety Messages in IEEE 802.11p/WAVE Vehicular Network: Analytical Study and Protocol Enhancements

Multi-channel IEEE WAVE 1609.4 protocol has been proposed to guarantee the co-existence of safety and non-safety applications over the same Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) scenario. While the usage of multi-channel avoids the risk of collisions between applications allocated on different frequencies, its implementation on a single-radio transceiver poses some major concerns about the effective utilization of the channel resources. In this paper, we study the performance of safety applications over multi-channel single-radio VANETs, and we present three novel contributions in this regard. First, we propose an analytical analysis and a simulation study of IEEE 1609.4. We show the harmful impact of synchronous channel switching on the message delay and delivery ratio. Second, we investigate the problem of dissemination of safety broadcast messages over multi-channel VANETs, where the network is intermittently disconnected, due to the alternation of control and service intervals. Finally, we propose a WAVE-enhanced Safety message Delivery (WSD) scheme to enable fast dissemination of safety messages over multi-channel VANETs, while guaranteeing compatibility with the existing WAVE stack. To this aim, we formulate the dissemination problem as a multi-channel scheduling problem. We further introduce cooperation among vehicles to reduce the dissemination latency. Simulation study shows the ability of the WSD scheme to enhance the performance of IEEE 1609.4 in terms of message delay and delivery ratio under different topologies and various applications.