A Comparison of Decentralized Congestion Control Algorithms for Multiplatooning Communications

To improve traffic safety, many Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) applications rely on exchange of periodic safety messages between vehicles. However, as the number of connected vehicles increases, control of channel congestion becomes a bottleneck for achieving high throughput. Without a suitable congestion control method, safety critical messages such as Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs) may not be delivered on time in high vehicle density scenarios that can lead to dangerous situations which can threaten people's health or even life. The Decentralized Congestion Control (DCC) algorithm defined by European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), becomes a vital component of C-ITS applications to keep channel load under control and below a predefined threshold level. In this paper, we aim to analyze and evaluate the performance of a number of DCC protocols including ETSI DCC by providing a comparison between them for the multiplatooning application by using several widely-used evaluation metrics.