Contention window adaptation for broadcast beaconing in vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular networking major concern is to effectively support intelligent transportation system applications. For that, robust, adaptive techniques for efficient communication and control between vehicles need to be developed. In this paper, the key issue under investigation is the efficient, intelligent provision of medium access control in vehicular ad hoc networks in the case of broadcast beaconing. A well established option is proposed, for controlling nonlinear systems using linguistic information, by utilizing fuzzy logic control. In particular, an intelligent adaptive controller, based on the traffic density, is built to regulate dynamically the contention window during message broadcasting. Simulation results, on dense and dynamic scenarios, reveal the inbuilt robustness and proficient control of the system provided by the proposed controller. This is in contrast with the conventional, IEEE 802.11p standard, solution we compared against, in terms of channel utilization, latency, collisions, beacon reception rate, and beacon inter-arrival time.