Cooperative communication for safety message dissemination in unsaturated networks with varying contention windows

Abstract

Safety message dissemination is crucial in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) for road safety applications. Vehicles regularly transmit safety messages to surrounding vehicles to prevent road accidents. However, changing vehicle mobility and density can cause unstable network conditions in VANETs, making it inappropriate to use a fixed contention window (CW) for different network densities. It has been proposed a 1-D Markov model under unsaturation conditions to analyze the performance of the system with varying CWs under changing vehicle densities. Additionally, it introduces the use of cooperative communication (CoC) to relay failed safety messages. In CoC, two control packets, namely, negative acknowledge (NACK) and enable to cooperate (ETC), are utilized. The proposed analytical model named cooperative communication for safety message dissemination (CoC-SMD) is used to calculate throughput and average packet delay for varying CW and different packet size. The simulation confirms the validity of the analytical results and show significant improvement in the metrics through the use of varying CW sizes and CoC compared with existing techniques.