Adaptive beacon rate control algorithm for vehicular ad-hoc networks

A key feature of the vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) is to broadcast the beacon message containing the position, speed, heading, etc. However, the fixed-rate scheme in the current standards may incur too large traffic load to the DSRC channel leading to a significant degradation of the network performance. In this paper, we present a new beacon rate control algorithm that succeeds in tracking the movement of nearby vehicles until K consecutive losses of the beacon message. From the numerical results of the simulation, we show that the proposed scheme can achieve much better performance than the fixed-rate scheme in term of the DSRC channel utilization and the successful vehicle tracking probability.