Analysis of adaptive beaconing protocols for intersection assistance systems

Cooperative vehicular applications require severe to moderate requirements of accuracy and latency according to their purpose. Those applications mainly rely on the periodic exchange of information directly causing congestion problems on the communication channel and thus obtaining unreliable information at the application level. Adaptive and reactive beaconing tries to overcome that fact adapting transmission parameters to different criterions such as channel load, application requirements or specific situations to improve the overall performance of the vehicle network. Nevertheless, it has not yet been determined to date if the information disseminated by these protocols is suitable for the implementation of specific applications. In this context, we analyze the system behavior in a realistic simulated high dense intersection where the probability of packet reception becomes unpredictable and analytical models become inaccurate. We present a critical analysis on the performance of four relevant state-of-the-art protocols with different aims and approaches while their performance is evaluated with respect to position accuracies required by different kind of RSU-based applications.