An Efficient Management of the Control Channel Bandwidth in VANETs

The management of radio congestion in the control channel is one of the active research areas in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). Many congestion control protocols have already been proposed to ensure an optimal management of the radio control channel. LIMERIC is a well-known congestion control protocol which was adopted by the current ETSI standardization process to be applied in the future deployment of VANETs. This protocol uses a mathematical equation to adjust the beaconing rate for each vehicle based on the measured channel load and a targeted channel load. However, efficiently managing all the available bandwidth using LIMERIC is yet to be achieved and still an open challenge. To address this issue, we propose a new approach that enhances LIMERIC protocol so that the available bandwidth would be used efficiently. Our aim is to bring the measured channel load as close as possible to the targeted level of channel load. Our method combines LIMERIC with a novel local density estimation approach called Segment based Local Density Estimation (SLDE). The performance evaluation shows that our approach uses the bandwidth efficiently and allows higher beaconing rate with a fair division of the available bandwidth.