A Traffic-Aware Beacon Scheme for Cooperative Driving and Network Routing Trade-Off

Vehicular communication networks have the potential to become not only an off-load channel for traditional networks but an enabling technology to bring the deployment of advanced cooperative driving systems to reality. The necessary information to maintain both applications working is expected to be transmitted among vehicles through small and periodic messages called beacons. However, beacons have been addressed independently for each application. It occurs due to differences in time interval requirements, which primarily impact the network performance in high-traffic density conditions. In this work, we propose a traffic-aware beacon scheme that simultaneously considers cooperative driving with a multi-anticipative car-following model and network routing with a position-based routing protocol GPSR. The proposed scheme continuously adapts the beacon interval time according to three traffic conditions evaluated through extensive computer simulations. The results show a smooth speed profile, close tracking of preceding vehicles, and a reduced impact of beacons on the communication network performance in an urban scenario.