Inter-vehicle communications: assessing information dissemination under safety constraints

The main goal of inter-vehicle communication technologies is to provide each vehicle with the required information about its surrounding in order to assist the driver avoiding potential dangers. The required information level, or awareness, can be achieved by the exchange of periodic status messages (beacons) among neighboring vehicles together with the quick dissemination of information about potential hazards. In previous work, we proposed an algorithm (D-FPAV) to control the beaconing load on the medium by adjusting the transmission power in a fair and distributed fashion. In this paper, we adapt a promising position-based message forwarding strategy in order to disseminate time-critical safety information. Moreover, we evaluate its performance when making use of D-FPAV, i.e., limiting the beaconing load on the medium, in a realistic highway environment with probabilistic radio propagation characteristics