Beaconing Performance in IEEE 802.11p Vehicular Networks: the Effect of Radio Channel Congestion

In this paper, we study the performance of the beaconing mechanism underlying active safety vehicular applications in presence of different levels of channel congestion. The importance of this study lies in the fact that channel congestion is considered a major factor influencing communication performance in vehicular networks, and that ours is the first investigation of the effects of congestion based on extensive, real-world measurements. The results of our study reveal that congestion has a profound impact on the most important beaconing performance metric, namely, packet (beacon) inter reception time, influencing not only the average value, but also the shape of the distribution. Congestion also considerably increases the frequency of potentially dangerous situation-awareness blackouts, with a likely negative impact on the effectiveness of active safety applications. Our study also reveals that multihop propagation of beaconing information can be used as an effective means of lessening the negative impact of congestion on beaconing performance.