Prioritized Optimal Channel Allocation Schemes for Multi-Channel Vehicular Networks

The IEEE 1609.4 standard has been proposed to provide multi-channel operations in wireless access for vehicular environments (WAVE), where all channels are periodically synchronized into control and service intervals. Communication device in each vehicle will stay at the control channel for negotiation and contention during the control interval, and thereafter switch to one of the service channels for data transmission in the service interval. In this paper, based on the concept of cognitive radio (CR), the vehicles are categorized into primary providers (PPs) that intend to transmit safety-related messages and secondary providers (SPs) with non-safety information to be delivered. The prioritized optimal channel allocation (POCA) approaches are proposed to improve channel utilization of IEEE 1609.4 standard for multi-channel vehicular networks. Prioritized channel access is analyzed in the POCA schemes in order to increase the transmission opportunity of PPs. Moreover, depending on whether the CR network is distributed or centralized, the optimal channel-hopping sequence and optimal channel allocation is assigned for SPs based on dynamic programming and linear programming technique, respectively. These schemes are designed to consider optimal load balance between both channel availability and channel utilization within the throughput constraints of PPs. With the adoption of proposed POCA schemes, simulation results show that maximum throughput of SPs can be achieved with guaranteed quality-of-service requirement for PPs.