Performance of beacon safety message dissemination in Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs)

Currently, there is a growing belief that putting an IEEE 802.11-like radio into road vehicles can help the drivers to travel more safely. Message dissemination protocols are primordial for safety vehicular applications. There are two types of safety messages which may be exchanged between vehicles: alarm and beacon. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of deploying safety applications based on beacon message dissemination through extensive simulation study and pay special attention to the safety requirements. Vehicles are supposed to issue these messages periodically to announce to other vehicles their current situation and use received messages for preventing possible unsafe situations. We evaluate the performance of a single-hop dissemination protocol while taking into account the quality of service (QoS) metries like delivery rate and delay. We realize that reliability is the main concern in beacon message dissemination. Thus, a new metric named effective range is defined which gives us more accurate facility for evaluating QoS in safety applications specifically. Then, in order to improve the performance, the effects of three parameters including vehicle's transmission range, message transmission's interval time and message payload size are studied. Due to special characteristics of the safety applications, we model the relationship between communication-level QoS and application-level QoS and evaluate them for different classes of safety applications. As a conclusion, the current technology of IEEE 802.11 MAC layer has still some challenges for automatic safety applications but it can provide acceptable QoS to driver assistance safety applications.