A Collaborative Environment Perception Approach for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we focus on vehicular safety applications based on the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) standard. We propose a new mechanism to alleviate channel congestion by reducing the beacons load while maintaining an accurate awareness level. Our scheme is based on the collective perception concept which consists in sharing perceived status information collected by vehicles equipped with different types of sensors (radars, lidars, cameras, etc.). To achieve our goal, we propose two main schemes. The first one consists in implementing the collective perception capability on vehicles and adding a new category of status messages to share locally collected sensor data in order to reduce channels load and enhance vehicles' awareness. The second scheme concerns the accuracy level of the received information from the collective perception enabled vehicles by fixing a prior error threshold on the position. The method proposed is validated by simulations and the results obtained are compared to those of an application based on the traditional beaconing scheme of the IEEE802.11p standard. The simulations show that the proposed scheme is able to significantly reduce the load on the control channel incurred by the beacons and the packet error ratio for different network densities and built-in sensors characteristics.