Study on merging control supported by IEEE 802.11p systems for highway environments

International audienceCooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) systems are intended to make driving safer and more efficient by utilizing information exchange between vehicles (V2V) and/or between vehicles and infrastructures (V2I). An important application of CACC is safe vehicle merging when vehicles join a main road, achieved by compiling information on the movement of individual main road vehicles. To support such road safety applications, the IEEE standardized the 802.11p amendment dedicated to V2V and V2I communications. This paper seek answers to the questions as to whether the IEEE 802.11p can support merging control and how the communications performance is translated into the CACC performance. We build an analytical model of the IEEE 802.11p medium access control (MAC) for transmissions of the ETSI-standardized Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAM) and Decentralized Environmental Notification Messages (DENM) to support merging control. We also developed a highway merging decision algorithm. Using computer simulations, packet delivery ratio (PDR), and packet inter-reception (PIR) time of IEEE 802.11p-based V2V and V2I communications and their impact on the CACC performance are investigated. Our study discloses several useful insights including that PIR and throughput provide a good indication of the CACC performance, while improving PDR does not necessarily enhance the CACC performance. Moreover, thanks to its ability to reliably provide information at constant time intervals, the V2I structure preferred over V2V as a support for CACC

Performance and Reliability Evaluation for DSRC Vehicular Safety Communication

<p>Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) is a vital part of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), which has been extensively researched in recent years. Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) is being seriously considered by automotive industry and government agencies as a promising wireless technology for enhancing transportation safety and efficiency of road utilization. In the DSRC based vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), the transportation safety is one of the most crucial features that needs to be addressed. Safety applications usually demand direct vehicle-to-vehicle ad hoc communication due to a highly dynamic network topology and strict delay requirements. Such direct safety communication will involve a broadcast service because safety information can be beneficial to all vehicles around a sender. Broadcasting safety messages is one of the fundamental services in DSRC. In order to provide satisfactory quality of services (QoS) for various safety applications, safety messages need to be delivered both timely and reliably. To support the stringent delay and reliability requirements of broadcasting safety messages, researchers have been seeking to test proposed DSRC protocols and suggesting improvements. A major hurdle in the development of VANET for safety-critical services is the lack of methods that enable one to determine the effectiveness of VANET design mechanism for predictable QoS and allow one to evaluate the tradeoff between network parameters. Computer simulations are extensively used for this purpose. A few analytic models and experiments have been developed to study the performance and reliability of IEEE 802.11p for safety-related applications. In this thesis, we propose to develop detailed analytic models to capture various safety message dissemination features such as channel contention, backoff behavior, concurrent transmissions, hidden terminal problems, channel fading with path loss, multi-channel operations, multi-hop dissemination in 1-Dimentional or 2-Dimentional traffic scenarios. MAC-level and application-level performance metrics are derived to evaluate the performance and reliability of message broadcasting, which provide insights on network parameter settings. Extensive simulations in either Matlab or NS2 are conducted to validate the accuracy of our proposed models.</p>Dissertatio