Design and evaluation of adaptive beaconing algorithms for cooperative vehicular safety systems

Abstract

In cooperative vehicular safety systems, the beaconing process is essential for tracking neighboring vehicles and supporting safety applications. Although different congestion and awareness control approaches have been proposed, to date, little attention has been paid on whether these approaches are adequate or not to support safety applications. This thesis addresses the challenge of guaranteeing the proper performance of safety applications by designing and evaluating distributed beaconing algorithms based on adaptive control of transmission parameters. Specifically, I propose and evaluate a POSition-ACCuracy (POSACC) based adaptive beaconing algorithm which prioritizes the position error and communication reliability maintaining the warning distance, channel load, and end-to-end latency into the operative range of safety applications. I also evaluate other relevant adaptive approaches to understand their benefits and limitations regarding road safety. In addition, I assess the incident detection capability of the overtaking application in autonomous driving when it is running with messages gathered from the addressed approaches, considering packet losses due to channel fading. Simulation results show that POSACC not only is more effective than the addressed approaches for guaranteeing the operational requirements of safety applications in a wider range of traffic situations but also for detecting unsafe overtaking maneuvers in different operating conditions.