Distributed Transmit Power Control for Beacons in VANET

In vehicle to vehicle communication, every vehicle broadcasts its status information periodically in its beacons to create awareness for surrounding vehicles. However, when the wireless channel is congested due to beaconing activity, many beacons are lost due to packet collision. This paper presents a distributed congestion control algorithm to adapt beacons transmit power. The algorithm is based on game theory, for which the existence of the Nash Equilibrium (NE) is proven and the uniqueness of the NE and stability of the algorithm is verified using simulation. The proposed algorithm is then compared with other congestion control mechanisms using simulation. The results of the simulations indicate that the proposed algorithm performs better than the others in terms of fairness, bandwidth usage, and the ability to meet the application requirements.