Adaptive Beaconing Approaches for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: A Survey

Vehicular communication requires vehicles to self-organize through the exchange of periodic beacons. Recent analysis on beaconing indicates that the standards for beaconing restrict the desired performance of vehicular applications. This situation can be attributed to the quality of the available transmission medium, persistent change in the traffic situation and the inability of standards to cope with application requirements. To this end, this paper is motivated by the classifications and capability evaluations of existing adaptive beaconing approaches. To begin with, we explore the anatomy and the performance requirements of beaconing. Then, the beaconing design is analyzed to introduce a design-based beaconing taxonomy. A survey of the state of the art is conducted with an emphasis on the salient features of the beaconing approaches. We also evaluate the capabilities of beaconing approaches using several key parameters. A comparison among beaconing approaches is presented, which is based on the architectural and implementation characteristics. The paper concludes by discussing open challenges in the field.