Beaconing as a service: a novel service-oriented beaconing strategy for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks are designed to increase traffic safety by enabling fast reactions of drivers in critical situations. Vehicles exchange beacon messages about their current state and position using wireless communication to establish a certain level of awareness. Based on the received information, the collision probability with neighboring vehicles can be calculated. To calculate a collision probability accurately, highly up-to-date knowledge about the movement of potential collision partners is required. Due to the dynamic network topology, vehicles are supposed to send periodic beacons at an increased transmit rate. However, as wireless communication suffers from packet interference issues in saturated communication channels, an increased beacon rate also raises the interference probability. Thus, decreasing interference by increasing the awareness level seems contradictory. To overcome this issue, we introduce our beaconing as a service (BaaS) approach, which follows two core aspects: first, controlling the beacon rate intelligently with respect to the real benefit of a message transmission (e.g., when a vehicle detects a potential collision situation); and second, utilizing the overall communication bandwidth, which is divided into several communication channels. In this sense BaaS specifies a context-aware request/response beaconing strategy utilizing multiple channels simultaneously.