Maximizing Saturation Throughput of Control Channel in Vehicular Networks

Described in the specifications of WAVE (Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments) standards, broadcast is the main traffic in vehicular networks when all vehicles monitor the control channel. In this paper, we show a simple Markov model to analyze the saturation throughput of control channel broadcast, our analysis reveals that existing IEEE 802.11p parameter settings can result in degraded network performance. In particular, the argument that the contention window size determines the performance of broadcast is concluded. Moreover, we propose a novel scheme which can achieve an optimal throughput by adapting the contention window size to the networks size. Both theoretical analyses and simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposal.