On the use of bio-inspired desynchronization algorithms for beaconing in ITS

Road safety applications heavily rely on periodic message exchanges known as beaconing in order to gain awareness about the current situation within the vehicle communication range. The high level of transmission contention in dense vehicular networks can induce successive beacon collisions. These collisions impede the vehicles to have an up-to-date view of the environment which can lead to bad decisions from the applications and in the worst case create car crashes. Many propositions of the literature try to tackle this problem by modifying the beacon emission period and/or power either randomly or based on the network density or other measured indicators. In this paper, we explore the possibility to use bio-inspired desynchronization algorithms to avoid beacon collisions. The main idea behind these algorithms is to make nodes converging toward a consensus where they do not emit their beacon at the same time in order to avoid collisions. We show that desynchronization algorithms, if properly implemented, can significantly reduce the probability to have large inter-beacon delays.