SPRCA: Distributed Multisource Information Propagation in Multichannel VANETs

Abstract

Information dissemination in VANETs mainly focuses on, e.g., the propagation of cooperative awareness messages and decentralized environmental notification messages on the control channel. As vehicles advance toward higher automation levels, VANETs should support more complex traffic services, which generates the demand for the propagation of Internet Protocol (IP)-based information and service data in multichannel environment as specified by IEEE Standard for Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE). Multisource propagation in the multichannel environments will incur multisource relay confliction (MRC) which leads to higher latency and lower information propagation speed (IPS). However, the problem of how to mitigate the impact of MRC and maintain high IPS has not been studied sufficiently. In this paper, we propose success probability based relay contention algorithm (SPRCA) for mitigating the impact of MRC under WAVE channel environments. SPRCA presents a vital metric, success probability, for each vehicle to determine whether to join the relay candidate set of certain source and execute relay contention algorithm. SPRCA explores both real time location information of vehicles and stochastic properties of vehicular distribution. We construct a theoretical model for analyzing the performance of SPRCA with a stochastic geometry-based approach and derive the properties of the performance of SPRCA. We further demonstrate the network performance and the practicality in dynamic VANETs of SPRCA through simulations with realistic traffic flow data.