An approach for selective beacon forwarding to improve cooperative awareness

Cooperative awareness is established by vehicles exchanging their status frequently. In situations where a high number of vehicles access the communication channel with high frequency, communication and cooperative awareness suffer from increased packet loss. So far, forwarding of beacons focuses on extending the range of V2V communication which is not necessarily needed in most scenarios. In this paper, we motivate selective beacon forwarding to improve the reliability of cooperative awareness in high load situations. We define a metric to measure the quality of cooperative awareness and compare different static beacon rates by a simulation study. Especially in high load situations, we evaluate selective forwarding of beacons to overcome the awareness degradation due to interference, leading to packet loss even at short distances. We show that our approach causes only slight overhead in terms of additional messages and that the age of forwarded information is less than half the beacon interval.