Distributed spatial reuse distance control for basic safety messages in SDMA-based VANETs

The periodic generation and transmission of basic safety messages (BSM) place a heavy burden on the load of a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), where there also remain multiple packet collisions undetected due to the hidden terminals. In this paper, we propose a distributed scheme that controls the spatial reuse distance to improve the efficiency of BSM transmissions in space-division multiple access (SDMA) based VANETs. With the proposed SDMA structure, only vehicles located sufficiently far apart are allowed to reuse the same time slot to send their BSMs. The signal interference is thus reduced while the hidden-node problem is essentially alleviated. Multiple transmissions per SDMA road segment or ‘cell’ are also enabled using the Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA), giving rise to a much better use of both space and bandwidth. To guarantee that the actual number of BSM transmissions does not exceed the maximum allowable in each SDMA cell, we further devise an adaptive scheme that adjusts the spatial reuse distance in accordance with the vehicle density. Because the global information of vehicle density is not available at individual vehicles, we propose a distributed algorithm that estimates the vehicle density and makes consensus to enhance the accuracy of spatial reuse distance estimation. As the transmission range is controlled accordingly, the mutual interference among the SDMA cells is further reduced. Importantly, the developed control algorithm can be distributively implemented by each vehicle with limited information exchange. To optimize the performance of the proposed solution, we also determine the optimal bandwidth utilization that maximizes the newly-defined criterion termed as ‘safe range,’ an important figure-of-merit in vehicular safety applications. Simulation results confirm the clear advantages of our proposal over the available approaches in terms of safety range, packet reception rate, end-to-end delay and BSM inter-arrival time in realistic network scenarios.