Road Incident Detection Under Rate Adaptation-Based Congestion Control in Cooperative Vehicular Systems

Cooperative vehicular systems require that vehicles fuse sensor data and broadcast one-hop safety messages containing their kinematic information to enable vehicular applications based on incident detection. Several congestion control mechanisms have been proposed to mitigate channel congestion resulting from the continuous transmission of safety messages. This paper investigates the effect of message rate adaptation-based congestion control from a road safety perspective by evaluating the feasibility of prominent approaches, such as PULSAR, LIMERIC, reactive ETSI DCC, and SAE J2945/1, to support lane-changing maneuvers on multi-lane highways under varying conditions. Simulation results demonstrate that message size, vehicular density, losses at the physical layer, and observation time significantly influence the lane-changing application’s capability to detect unsafe maneuvers when congestion control is in action. Specific recommendations and guidelines for congestion control are provided to improve decision-making at the application level.