Joint Age of Information and Self Risk Assessment for Safer 802.11p based V2V Networks

Emerging 802.11p vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) networks rely on periodic Basic Safety Messages (BSMs) to disseminate time-sensitive safety-critical information, such as vehicle position, speed, and heading - that enables several safety applications and has the potential to improve on-road safety. Due to mobility, lack of global-knowledge and limited communication resources, designing an optimal BSM broadcast rate-control protocol is challenging. Recently, minimizing Age of Information (AoI) has gained momentum in designing BSM broadcast rate-control protocols. In this paper, we show that minimizing AoI solely does not always improve the safety of V2V networks. Specifically, we propose a novel metric, termed Trackability-aware Age of Information TAoI, that in addition to AoI, takes into account the self risk assessment of vehicles, quantified in terms of self tracking error (self-TE) - which provides an indication of collision risk posed by the vehicle. Self-TE is defined as the difference between the actual location of a certain vehicle and its self-estimated location. Our extensive experiments, based on realistic SUMO traffic traces on top of ns-3 simulator, demonstrate that TAoI based rate-protocol significantly outperforms baseline AoI based rate protocol and default 10 Hz broadcast rate in terms of safety performance, i.e., collision risk, in all considered V2V settings.

Automated summary

This study suggests that solely minimizing the Age of Information (AoI) does not always improve the safety of V2V networks. Introducing a new metric TAoI, which considers the risk assessment of vehicles, can significantly outperform baseline AoI protocols in terms of safety performance.