Safety beaconing rate control based on vehicle counting in WAVE

In the IEEE Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) environment, periodic beacon messages enable proximity awareness that helps prevent collisions. One of the barriers that hinder the beacon delivery is congestion, which means that the amount of beacon traffic exceeds the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) channel capacity. In this paper, we propose a scheme for vehicles to independently adjust the beaconing rate based on the estimated neighbor vehicle population. Unlike previously proposed works, the proposed scheme does not need cross-layer information such as channel busy ratio (CBR) in order to achieve significant beacon throughput. We demonstrate through extensive simulations that this scheme significantly improves the beacon throughput.