Analysis of application-specific broadcast reliability for vehicle safety communications

Abstract

Broadcasting is the primary way of exchanging time-sensitive information in VANETs. However, contiguous loss of broadcasts among vehicles may lead to situations where a vehicle has not heard from a neighbor for extensive periods of time. The goal of this work is to provide an analysis of this invisible neighbor problem and the impact the selected transmission range and packet generation rate of a vehicle have on the occurrences of this problem. Specifically, this work studies this problem in the context of application-specific safety requirements, i.e., the goal is to minimize the number of invisible neighbors within a certain region of interest (ROI), whose size depends on the type of safety application. Extensive simulation results indicate that the combination of relatively large transmission ranges and small packet generation rates (e.g., 2-4 packets/s) lead to the lowest number of invisible neighbors.