Dynamic Channel Selection for Real-Time Safety Message Communication in Vehicular Networks

Ensuring the real-time delivery of safety messages is an important research problem for Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication. Unfortunately, existing work relies only on one or two pre-selected control channels for safety message communication, which can result in poor packet delivery and potential accident when the vehicle density is high. If all the available channels can be dynamically utilized when the control channel is having severe contention, safety messages can have a much better chance to meet their real-time deadlines. In this paper, we propose MC-Safe, a multi-channel V2V communication framework that monitors all the available channels and dynamically selects the best one for safety message transmission. MC-Safe features a novel channel negotiation scheme that allows all the vehicles involved in a potential accident to work collaboratively, in a distributed manner, for identifying a communication channel that meets the delay requirement. Our evaluation results both in simulation and on a hardware testbed with scaled cars show that MC-Safe outperforms existing single-channel solutions and other well-designed multi-channel baselines by having a 12.31% lower deadline miss ratio and an 8.21% higher packet delivery ratio on average.