Protocols for network throughput optimisation in intelligent vehicle highway communication systems

We consider a communications system consisting of intermittently located highway microcells where each cell is illuminated by a roadside microwave beacon. We study the use of this system in IVHS applications, and propose two protocols and compare their performance in terms of probability of message success. In both protocols, a downlink message is routed to a set of N beacons in order to increase the probability of message success. The protocols differ in the way a beacon handles messages successfully transmitted by other beacons. The results show that routing a message to more than one beacon simultaneously improves performance significantly only if a packet successfully transmitted by a beacon is discarded by other beacons to which a copy of the same message was sent