Mobility-Adaptive Beacon Broadcast for Vehicular Cooperative Safety-Critical Applications

Beacon broadcast is an essential mechanism to improve the awareness of driving situations by broadcasting vehicle kinematics to its neighbor vehicles at a regular rate. However, the current design of beacon broadcast does not fulfill the awareness requirement of many emerging safety-critical applications. In this paper, we present the mobility-adaptive beacon broadcast (MAB
²
) scheme for guaranteed tracking of degree (GTD) K. In the GTD K, a neighbor vehicle can estimate the position of the sending vehicle within a fixed threshold, given that the former receives at least one of the K latest beacons of the latter. To aim this, we characterize the feasible kinematics of the sending vehicle in the subsequent time, address how the MAB
²
scheme defers a new beacon broadcast as long as the tracking condition meets, and present several rigorous proofs on the correctness and optimality of the MAB
²
scheme. Numerical results show that the MAB
²
scheme achieves an outstanding GTD-K tracking performance, in terms of the timeliness of beacon broadcast, the reliability of vehicle tracking, and the tracking accuracy, while minimizing the DSRC CCH congestion.