Load balancing aware SDMA-based beaconing approach in vehicular ad hoc networks

Neighborhood discovery is a fundamental link layer service for safety and non-safety applications in VANETs. Till now, this service is made available by beaconing. But, several studies demonstrate its inefficiency. In the literature, several papers propose adaptive strategies to alleviate the channel load problem, but packet loss due to collision remains an open issue due to the randomness of beacon sending through the network. In this paper, we propose an SDMA-based beaconing with load balancing method that distributes beacon sending load fairly. In the proposed scheme, the vehicles self-organize themselves into groups depending on their positions. Then, all beacons are sent sequentially along the period, thereby reducing the congestion. We drive extensive simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy.