Experimental Analysis of Safety Application Reliability in V2V Networks

TL;DR

This paper experimentally analyzes how beacon rate affects safety in V2V networks, finding a unique optimal rate for safety performance that correlates with Age of Information, especially under varying vehicle densities.

Contribution

It identifies a unique beacon rate that maximizes safety performance in V2V networks and links collision risk to network metrics like AoI and throughput.

Findings

A unique beacon rate maximizes safety performance.

AoI strongly correlates with collision risk.

Throughput is effective only at high vehicle densities.

Abstract

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication networks enable safety applications via periodic broadcast of Basic Safety Messages (BSMs) or \textit{safety beacons}. Beacons include time-critical information such as sender vehicle's location, speed and direction. The vehicle density may be very high in certain scenarios and such V2V networks suffer from channel congestion and undesirable level of packet collisions; which in turn may seriously jeopardize safety application reliability and cause collision risky situations. In this work, we perform experimental analysis of safety application reliability (in terms of \textit{collision risks}), and conclude that there exists a unique beacon rate for which the safety performance is maximized, and this rate is unique for varying vehicle densities. The collision risk of a certain vehicle is computed using a simple kinematics-based model, and is based on \textit{tracking error}, defined as the difference between vehicle's actual position and the perceived location of that vehicle by its neighbors (via most-recent beacons). Furthermore, we analyze the interconnection between the collision risk and two well-known network performance metrics, \textit{Age of Information} (AoI) and \textit{throughput}. Our experimentation shows that AoI has a strong correlation with the collision risk and AoI-optimal beacon rate is similar to the safety-optimal beacon rate, irrespective of the vehicle densities, queuing sizes and disciplines. Whereas throughput works well only under higher vehicle densities.