Traffic-Aware Beacon Interval for Position-Based Protocols in VANETs

Position-based protocols in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) depend on the transmission of periodic beacon messages to keep the nodes informed about the current position of their neighbors. However, an excessive load of beacons can drastically deteriorate the network performance. This work presents a novel adaptive vehicular traffic-aware strategy to compute the beacon interval in a position-based protocol. The strategy relies on three mobility factors: vehicular density, the mean difference of speed among neighbors, and the spatial distribution of neighbors. Its effectiveness is proven through extensive simulations in an urban mobility scenario using the packet delivery ratio, the average end-to-end delay, overhead, and processing time as the performance metrics. The results show that our approach maintains a high delivery ratio and low End-To-End delay, overhead, and processing time regardless of the density of the surrounding vehicular traffic. The results also show that our method uses the available beacon interval range more efficiently than another traffic-aware approach.