A Cooperative Safety Zone Approach to Enhance the Performance of VANET Applications

Safety applications in VANETs relies on various type of information exchanges among vehicles of which Cooperative Awareness Message (CAM) has the largest share in the network load due to their periodic broadcast nature. As the vehicle density grows, the load generated by the CAMs could increase beyond the transmission capacity of a VANET resulting in the loss of neighborhood information and a higher utilization of the control channel. In this paper, we present the concept of a safety zone to adaptively control the transmit power of CAMs to restrict the network load without compromising the safety features of VANET applications. Moreover, we also introduce a new cooperative information sharing technique to increase the vehicle´s awareness beyond the transmission range. The simulation results show that the proposed technique could significantly reduce the packet losses and channel utilization for a range of vehicle densities.