Coordination of Congestion and Awareness Control in Vehicular Networks

Vehicular networks need to guarantee the communication reliability levels necessary to satisfy the application requirements, while ensuring a stable network operation even under dense deployments. To this aim, congestion and awareness control protocols dynamically adapt the same communication parameters based on context conditions. If the two protocols operate independently, negative interactions or conflicts can arise. This situation can occur if for example congestion control requires decreasing the transmission power to reduce the channel load, but this reduction negatively influences the vehicles’ awareness range. To address these interactions or conflicts, this paper proposes and evaluates a methodology to coordinate congestion and awareness control protocols. A key advantage of the proposed methodology is that it does not require the integration of the interacting protocols, nor does it require changing their original design. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed coordination methodology. In addition, the proposed methodology can be extended to the coordination of multiple protocols operating over the same communication parameters. This is here demonstrated considering the coordination of congestion, awareness and topology control protocols.