Congestion control in vehicular networks using network coding

Beacon messages are periodic 1-hop broadcast messages which are sent by each vehicle to let neighboring vehicles/infrastructures be aware of its position, speed, and change of direction. Beacon information plays a crucial role for many applications including active safety applications through which vehicles can predict the position of neighboring vehicles and be able to take instant decisions to avoid any emergency situation. However, such influx of broadcast messages may lead to beacon overhead and congestion. These result in low message reception as well as excessive delay. Beacon overhead and congestion may affect emergency messages, channel arbitration messages and other control messages which share a common channel as specified by DRSC/WAVE. This paper proposes a mechanism for controlling beacon overhead by adopting packet level network coding. The simulations prove that our scheme has higher packet delivery ratio and higher successful channel utilization compared to CSMA/CA protocol.