Context-aware Hybrid Adaptive Beaconing for Driver Behavior Dissemination in VANETs

VANET is a special paradigm of high mobility ad hoc network that promotes communication among the vehicles to enhance traffic safety. Cooperative awareness is the basic principle of VANETs that is accomplished by periodic exchange of beacons/ WSMs between vehicles. Due to highly dynamic topology and irregular distribution of vehicles, there is a necessity of a flexible beaconing mechanism that maintains a balance between the required level of cooperative awareness and network load and overcomes the limitations of periodic beaconing scheme of IEEE 802.11p. We proposed a context-aware hybrid beaconing algorithm that piggybacks driver status in beacon and disseminates it to the neighboring vehicles to enhance safety. The complete context has been considered to get the value of driver status and initial network status using SBN. The proposed technique considers real-time network congestion status and dynamically adapts the transmission range and power parameters at PHY layer, and beacon interval and CW at MAC layer using EDCA mechanism. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been evaluated using SUMO and NS-3 based on PDR, WSM PDR, goodput, and EED. The proposed algorithm demonstrates comparable WSM PDR to the benchmark scheme of LIMERIC and outperforms periodic beaconing scheme by exhibiting 35% improvement in WSM PDR on CCH and 15% improvement in PDR on SCH. Further, our proposed approach depicts more realistic scenario by considering the complete context; and maintains balance between transmission of safety and non-safety messages, thus, preventing starvation of non-safety applications as compared to the techniques in the existing literature.