On Reliability Requirement for BSM Broadcast for Safety Applications
in DSRC System
Wenfeng Li
1
Jun Wu
2
Xiaomin Ma
3
, Member, IEEE, and Zhifeng Zhang
4
Abstract— In this paper, we derive application-level reliability
metrics of various safety applications with worst-case settings
and vehicular environments based on an accurate analytical
model in one dimension vehicular communication networks.
The reliability related QoS metrics in both the MAC-level and
the Application-level including packet reception ratio, T-window
reliability, and awareness probability are derived. Inspired by
the correlation between road traffic and vehicle speed revealed
by Greenshields model, we observe that the current reliability
related QoS requirements for safety applications are set without
considering change of road traffic. Based on the observation, a
new reliability requirement setting is proposed to tune tolerance
time for various safety applications with different road traffic.
The QoS requirements for the three typical safety applications
that are believed to have the most stringent QoS requirements
are specified and discussed. Taking velocity, density and time
into account, application-level reliability metrics are improved
for high vehicle density. From the results obtained under worst
case with different vehicle density, we can observe the feasibility
of our proposed reliability requirement setting.
I. INTRODUCTION
The recent development of the Intelligent Transportation
System (ITS) [1] which is empowered by wireless commu-
nication technologies is very promising. Vehicular ad hoc
network (VANET) is one of the key enabling components
in ITS. VANET consists of a large number of vehicles
that are capable of wireless communication in an ad hoc
manner without central control. Dedicated Short Range
Communication (DSRC) or Wireless Access in Vehicular
Environments, being standardized as IEEE 802.11p [2] [3],
are put on vehicles to support information exchange in
vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I).
VANET can support many safety-related applications [4]
with one-hop or multi-hop broadcasting to disseminate mes-
sages from each vehicle [5] [6]. These messages, which are
called beacon or basic safety message (BSM) [7], convey
information about the state of vehicles such as their position,
speed and direction periodically. The receiving vehicles can
use BSMs to estimate states of all their neighboring vehicles,
then determines whether to provide warnings to the drivers.
Potential safety applications of DSRC in VANET usually
require highly reliable and real-time broadcast communica-
tion among the mobile nodes under adverse environments.
Therefore, delivering messages reliably and efficiently to all
*This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation
China under Grant 61173041.
1
W. Li,
2
J. Wu and
4
Z. Zhang are with College of Electronics and
Information Engineering, Tongji University, 201804 Shanghai, P. R. China
1210505@tongji.edu.cn; wujun@tongji.edu.cn
3
X. Ma is with the Engineering and Physics Department, Oral Roberts
University,Tulsa, OK 74171 USA xma@oru.edu
surrounding nodes in a VANET is a big challenge. The gener-
ation rate of typical BSM messages is from 2 to 10 messages
per second in the literature [8]–[10]. Obviously, maintaining
the BSM generation rate at the maximum possible level is
essential to guarantee reliability of vehicular networking [11]
[12]. However, it is worth noting that collisions among BSMs
from neighboring vehicles have a significant impact on the
reliability of VANET broadcast, especially when vehicles
density on the road is very high.
Many studies show that lowering BSM generation rate
can reduce the collisions and improve reliability of DSRC
under some heavy traffic conditions. In [13], a rate control
approach is proposed. Each node can adapt their transmis-
sion power and transmission interval according to the local
environment in order to avoid excessive packet collisions
under high density traffic conditions. Park et al. [14] propose
an application level messaging frequency estimation scheme
to estimate the neighboring vehicular density and adapt the
BSM transmission frequency. Huang et al. [15] analyze the
problem of how multiple scalar linear time-invariant dynam-
ical systems track each other over a multi-access channel,
and then, propose a distributed rate adaptation algorithm
to control the self-information broadcast behavior of each
vehicle. This algorithm uses a closed-loop control concept
and takes a lossy channel into consideration.
Several potential safety applications such as collision
avoidance, slow vehicle indication, and rear-end collision
avoidance, are likely to be among the quality of service
(QoS) critical applications of DSRC communications [16].
In this paper, we first introduce an accurate analytical model,
which has been initially evaluated for its validity in our
previous work [17], to derive application-level reliability
metrics of various safety applications in the vehicular com-
munication networks with worst-case settings. Then, the QoS
requirements for the three typical safety applications that are
believed to have the most stringent QoS requirements are
specified and discussed. We find out that the current QoS re-
quirements derived simply in the worst-case overestimate the
real required reliability for some specific safety applications.
The main contribution of this paper are detailed below:
• An accurate analytic model is applied to the analysis of
the QoS requirement for three typical BSM based safe-
ty applications from application-level standpoint under
worst-case settings and vehicular environments.
• From the correlation between road traffic and vehicle
speed revealed by Greenshields model, a new reliability
requirement setting is proposed to tune tolerance time
for various safety applications with different road traffic.
2014 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV)
June 8-11, 2014. Dearborn, Michigan, USA
978-1-4799-3637-3/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE 946