Improving Safety on Highways by Customizing Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks.

This paper studies the need for individualizing vehicular communications in order to improve safety for a highway scenario. Adapting a vehicular ad hoc network to both its individual driver’s characteristic and traffic conditions enables it to transmit in a smart manner to other vehicles. This radical improvement is now possible due to the progress that is being made in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). In this paper, we first derive the packet success probability for a chain of vehicles by taking multi-user interference, path loss, and fading into account. Then, by considering the delay constraints and types of potential collisions, we approximate the optimal channel access probabilities. Lastly, we propose an algorithm for customizing channel access probabilities in VANET. Our Monte Carlo simulation results show that this approach achieves more than 25% reduction in traffic collision probability compared with the case with equal channel access probabilities in its optimal range. Therefore, it has a huge advantage over other non-optimal systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]