On the exploitation of OFDMA properties for an efficient alert message flooding in VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) drive new challenging research issues at different layers of the protocol pillar, from physical to application. Focusing on the medium access layer, one of the most promising and not yet fully explored option is the adoption of orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). Besides guaranteeing high spectral efficiency and effective resource allocation, it relies at the physical layer on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, which allows repetitions of the same signals to be opportunistically combined at the receiver even if they are not perfectly synchronized. Exploiting this property, here we suggest and discuss the use of OFDMA for alert message flooding in VANETs to increase reliability and resource usage efficiency. The achievable benefit and the potential drawback (in terms of high delivery delay) are here assessed through a simple yet realistic model that allows to compare, in highway scenarios, OFDMA with carrier sensing multiple access/collision avoidance, currently adopted by IEEE 802.11p for distributed communications in high mobility scenarios.