Adaptive beaconing for safety enhancement in vehicular networks

For automotive safety applications, vehicles directly exchange periodic beacons that contain status information such as position, speed, acceleration, etc., and the application layer issues warnings if a hazardous situation is detected. The update rate of these beacons should be high enough to allow the application to swiftly react to prevent accidents and current recommendations provide fixed values for different safety use cases. This approach is sub-optimal since wireless resources might be used when not necessary, e.g., when cars are queuing at a traffic light, and the proposals made for variable beacon periodicity (BP) typically do not take into account the safety aspect or are strictly related to the access technology in use. This paper presents a new algorithm called beaconing adaptation for safety enhancement (BASE) that adapts the BP to minimize the amount of radio resources used by the safety application without breaching safety requirements. BASE is access technology agnostic and focuses on common traffic and traveling conditions (not on particular crossroads, overtaking, etc.), and the results presented in this paper show how it allows for substantial capacity gains in a highway collision-avoidance scenario.