LWSSP: A Single Channel Vehicular Networking Protocol for Road Safety Message Dissemination

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) for road-safety are of growing interest in the field of autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles. However, changes in the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) regulatory priorities have resulted in a substantial reduction in the bandwidth allocated for inter-vehicular networking (in the 5.9 GHz band) which adversely impacts the implementation-feasibility of some current standards.This paper presents a new bandwidth-efficient, single-channel, broadcast-driven Light Weight Signal Strength based Protocol (LWSSP) for autonomous and semi-autonomous inter-vehicular networks. In our proposed system, the road-safety related messages that are automatically generated by vehicles that experience adverse road incidents such as skidding over ice or being involved in or, witnessing a collision. These messages are then propagated cooperatively by participating vehicles over a long stretch of the roadway. LWSSP enhances scalability, reliability and timeliness of road-safety messages by lowering latencies and by increasing the message dissemination distances. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our approach by providing performance comparisons between our proposed scheme and the often-cited DSRC scheme.