Beacon-based Cooperative Forwarding Scheme for Safety Applications in IVC

Safety applications developed for inter-vehicle communications (IVC) are characterized by strict reliability and delay requirements, thus relying on multi-hop broadcasting to disseminate the traffic alert messages to all surrounding vehicles. However, the conventional broadcast schemes suffer from the so-called "broadcast storm problem", a scenario in which contention and collisions happens a lot due to an excessive number of broadcast packets. In this paper, we propose a broadcast scheme referred as beacon-based cooperative forwarding (BCF) scheme for alert message delivery in a vehicular scenario, which aims at i) designing a strategy to control the beaconing load on the wireless channel, ii) mitigating contention and minimize message delay and iii) guaranteeing high message reception rate. After realistic simulation studies, the BCF scheme demonstrated better performance than other contention-based schemes by reducing both end-to-end delay and the message rebroadcasting ratio by over 40% while maintaining a high message reception rate.