Journal of Network and Computer Applications ] (]]]]) ]]] ]]]

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Journal of Network and Computer Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jnca

Augmenting Vehicle-to-Roadside connectivity in multi-channel vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

C. Campolo a,n, H.A. Cozzetti b, A. Molinaro a, R. Scopigno b
a b

Universita Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria, DIMET (Dipartimento di Informatica, Matematica, Elettronica e Trasporti), Italy BWA Lab (Broadband Wireless Access), Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, Turin, Italy

a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history: Received 14 July 2011 Received in revised form 20 December 2011 Accepted 3 April 2012 Keywords: Connectivity IEEE 802.11p Multichannel organization Urban environment Network advertisements Vehicular networks WAVE

abstract
Vehicle-to-Roadside (V2R) wireless communication is a cornerstone for providing a wide plethora of intelligent transportation system (ITS) applications in the near future. Initial investment costs could discourage the deployment of a ubiquitous roadside infrastructure to support on-the-road networks; this would imply discontinuous coverage and short-lived connectivity. The purpose of this paper is to design techniques that make the best of sparse road-side unit (RSU) placement by supporting the spreading of network initialization advertisements from RSUs, when considering the multichannel features of the recently published IEEE 802.11p/IEEE 1609.4 standards for wireless access in vehicular environment (WAVE). The proposed techniques leverage time, space and channel diversity to improve efciency and robustness of the network advertisement procedure in a urban scenario where obstructions to signal propagation due to buildings and trafc jam could hinder successful message spreading. Simulation under different RSU density, vehicular networking technology penetration rate, data rate, and packet size, aims at assessing effectiveness and efciency of the proposed solutions. & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Several ongoing research projects supported by car manufacturers, electronic industries, governments and academia have been underway to accelerate the deployment of short-range wireless networks that exploit Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Roadside infrastructure (V2R) communications. These networks, named Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), are characterized by rapidly changing topologies and short connection lifetime. Drivers and passengers on VANET-equipped vehicles may benet of safety-critical, transport efciency and information/ entertainment (infotainment) services (Hossain et al., 2010). The latter two classes, referred to as non-safety services, aim at offering trafc information and augmenting comfort/entertainment for travelers on the road. So they have great potential as a driver for VANET market penetration. Beside multimedia interactive Internet-based applications (e.g., media streaming, voice over IP, Internet gaming, web browsing), new applications, not necessarily IP-based, are expected to be specically tailored to the vehicular environment (Gerla and
Corresponding author. Tel.: 393491775654. E-mail addresses: claudia.campolo@unirc.it (C. Campolo), cozzetti@ismb.it (H.A. Cozzetti), antonella.molinaro@unirc.it (A. Molinaro), scopigno@ismb.it (R. Scopigno). 1084-8045/$ - see front matter & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2012.04.001
n

Kleinrock, 2011). For instance, vehicles could collect data about trafc density and average car speed, or pollution measurements retrieved through on-the-road sensors; additionally, media-rich streaming (e.g., videos recorded by on board cameras) could be uploaded for monitoring purposes to remote Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS); moreover, identications of detected malicious vehicles could be uploaded to a Certication Authority responsible for certicate revocation. On the other hand, Roadside Units (RSUs) could broadcast location-based information, e.g., news items, proximity advertisements about nearby petrol stations, museums, theaters, points-of-interests, and trafc-related information. We can say that almost the totality of non-safety applications targeted for the vehicular environment requires reliable connections between On-board Units (OBUs) on vehicles and the roadside communication infrastructure made up of Road-side Units (RSUs) located at the strategic places, e.g., at city crossroads or at gas stations along highways. High costs required for the deployment of a ubiquitous roadside communication infrastructure would result in only a few RSU installations in the early stage of vehicular network developments, thus providing discontinuous connectivity along the road. The RSU limited coverage plus OBU mobility (especially fast in highways) would lead to short RSU-OBU connection lifetimes. V2R connectivity is further challenged in urban scenarios, because of obstructions due to buildings which limit the network radio

Please cite this article as: Campolo C, et al. Augmenting Vehicle-to-Roadside connectivity in multi-channel vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2012.04.001

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coverage. Therefore, it is critical to make vehicles aware of nearby RSUs offering connectivity services in order to utilize the RSUs resources efciently. Recent studies have investigated the feasibility and performance of V2R communications to support non-safety applications (Ott and Kutscher, 2004; Bychkovsky et al., 2006; Zhao et al., 2008; Yoo et al., 2010). Some of them (Zhao et al., 2008; Yoo et al., 2010) have proposed to leverage V2V communications as a complement to possible lack of connectivity with the road infrastructure. However, to the best of our knowledge, previous works do not deal with the features and capabilities of the IEEE 802.11p/WAVE (Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments) standard (IEEE Std, 2010), recently ratied to better cope with the high dynamicity of vehicular environments. The standard relies on a multi-channel architecture that supports the delivery of safety and non-safety applications (IEEE 1609.4, 2011). Safety and control messages are conveyed on a xed frequency during a common control channel (CCH) interval; for the rest of the time, vehicles switch on a service channel (SCH) for non-safety data exchange within a Basic Service Set (BSS). RSUs (or even special OBUs) aiming to initialize a BSS are called providers; they advertise their presence during the CCH time interval by broadcasting WAVE Service Advertisement (WSA) messages, which specify the SCH frequency selected for BSS set-up, the offered services, and other connection parameters. A user interested in the services offered by the provider simply switches on the advertised frequency during the next SCH interval and joins the BSS. In the challenging vehicular environment, a BSS initialization is determined by the success of the WSA-based network advertisement procedure. Being broadcast messages, WSAs are never acknowledged by receivers. Their delivery could be hindered by channel impairments (e.g., fading, obstructions) or by collisions with interfering trafc delivered over the same channel, i.e., event-based safety messages (like collision warning) and periodic status messages called beacons. Beacons are one-hop broadcasted short messages through which all vehicles send status information about the vehicle type, position, speed, and direction. They are very useful to cooperative vehicular applications, such as collision avoidance, driver assistance, and cruise control,1 to neighbor discovery-based routing protocols, and to smart safety dissemination strategies. Robustness and efciency of the critical WSA-based 802.11p/ WAVE advertisement procedure have not been sufciently investigated in the literature. Hence, this paper serves the twofold purpose of 1. investigating limitations of the WAVE advertisement procedure in V2R communication scenarios under harsh propagation and variable trafc load conditions; 2. designing standard-compliant techniques that augment the WAVE advertisement procedure in order to increase the RSU-awareness, i.e., the percentage of vehicles which detect a RSU and hence benet from the BSS services offered on SCH. The smart and lightweight set of proposed techniques for strengthening information spreading about the RSU-advertised BSSs leverage time, space, and channel diversity. Time diversity is achieved by enabling multiple repetitions of WSAs per CCH interval, as suggested by the IEEE 1609.3 standard in IEEE P1609.3 SWG (2010). Space diversity is achieved by letting vehicles which receive a WSA from a one-hop distant RSU to
1 Although not explicitly mentioned in 802.11p/WAVE standards, beacons are cited as heartbeat messages in SAE International, DSRC Implementation Guide (2010) and as Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs) in ETSI TS 102 637-2 V1.1.1 (2010).

Fig. 1. 802.11p/WAVE stack.

piggyback partial or full information about the advertised BSS onto their own beacons, as initially proposed in our previous work in Campolo and Molinaro (2011a). Channel diversity exploits an additional WSA transmission at the SCH interval beginning to complement the advertisement phase carried out on the CCH interval. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The 802.11p/ WAVE standard specications are reported in Section 2; background and motivations for our research are provided in Section 3. The set of solutions proposed to improve robustness and efciency of the WAVE advertisement procedure are described in Section 4. Simulation assumptions and performance results under several propagation and trafc density conditions are presented in Section 5. Discussion and conclusive remarks are reported in Section 6.

2. IEEE 802.11p/WAVE networks The IEEE 802.11p task group (IEEE Std, 2010) has recently issued a set of physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layer specications to permit communications in the rapidly changing vehicular environment, which operates in the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) frequency band of 5.85 5.925 GHz. The IEEE 802.11p PHY layer is an amended version of the 802.11a specications, based on Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM), but with 10 MHz channels and data rates ranging from 3 Mbps to 27 Mbps. The IEEE 802.11p MAC layer has the same core mechanism of the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) specied for 802.11e, which is based on a prioritized Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) scheme. It provides differentiated channel access by assigning to trafc belonging to each of the four access categories (ACs) a set of distinct EDCA parameters, including Arbitration InterFrame Space (AIFS) and contention window (CW) size. The four classes are referred to as background (AC_BK), best effort (AC_BE), video (AC_VI) and voice (AC_VO) with increasing priority order. Higher-priority ACs have smaller CWs and shorter AIFSs. The IEEE 802.11p working group cooperates with IEEE 1609 in order to dene a whole protocol stack for vehicular environments, Fig. 1. The overall WAVE stack relies on one CCH, which is reserved for transporting control (e.g., WSAs, beacons) and safety data, and a given number of SCHs (it is up to four in the ETSI context, or to 6 in DSRC context) used to exchange non-safety data. The MAC layer is properly modied to work with the multi-channel organization; two separate EDCA functions are implemented, one for CCH and one for SCH, which handle different sets of queues for packets destined to be transmitted in different channel intervals with different EDCA parameter sets.

Please cite this article as: Campolo C, et al. Augmenting Vehicle-to-Roadside connectivity in multi-channel vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2012.04.001

C. Campolo et al. / Journal of Network and Computer Applications ] (]]]]) ]]] ]]]

Fig. 2. WAVE 1609.4 multichannel operation.

WAVE devices are expected to be developed either as singleradio devices, which operate on one radio channel at a time, or as multi-radio devices, which are capable of simultaneous operation on multiple radio channels. To allow both kinds of devices exchanging safety and non-safety data, the alternating channel access scheme has been proposed by IEEE 1609.4 (IEEE 1609.4, 2011). According to it, the channel time is divided into synchronization intervals with a xed length of 100 ms, Fig. 2, consisting of a CCH interval, during which all vehicular devices tune in the CCH frequency, and an SCH interval, during which vehicles (optionally) switch to one of the SCH frequencies. Channel coordination exploits a global time reference, such as the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which can be provided by a global navigation satellite system. The main straightforward drawback of this scheme is the halved channel capacity: more than half of the SCH bandwidth cannot be used during the CCH interval, and more than half of the CCH bandwidth channel cannot be used during the SCH interval. Mandatory alternating channel switching is also the cause of another type of event that is unique to WAVE networks: a frame cannot be transmitted if the residual time before the end of a channel interval is shorter than its transmission delay. Such a frame can be queued waiting for the next channel interval or dropped in case its lifetime is exceeded; in the latter case frame loss is due to channel expiry time. The WAVE stack supports both IPv6 protocol and a new lightweight WAVE-mode short message protocol (WSMP) specically designed for the exchange of short messages in vehicular networks. WSMP packets can carry high-priority time-sensitive safety messages, trafc and road messages, or also beacon frames. WSMP trafc can be directly exchanged by WAVE devices without the IP overhead both on CCH and SCH, while IP data can be exchanged only on the SCH. The 802.11p standard also introduced a new operational mode to facilitate communications in the highly dynamic vehicular environment; it is referred to as outside the context of a BSS (OCB). It allows wireless stations that are not members of a BSS to transmit data without preliminary authentication and association, by only relying on default parameter values. In OCB mode, data can be sent to either an individual or a group destination address with a wildcard BSS identier (all 1s). Although the OCB mode is mainly expected to be used for delivering locally-relevant safety messages on CCH, its usage could be extended to allow non IP-based data exchange also during the SCH interval.

interval. The role of a WAVE provider can be played both by RSUs or OBUs; but without loss of generality, in the remainder of the paper we refer to RSUs as the unique type of WAVE providers, since we are interested in V2R communications. WSAs contain all the information identifying the offered WAVE services and the network parameters necessary to join the BSS, such as the unique identier of the BSS (BSSID), the Provider Service Identier (PSID), the SCH this BSS will use, timing information, the EDCA parameters set to be used on the SCH, and information about how to connect to the Internet, e.g., default gateway and domain name server address, as depicted in Fig. 3. Some information carried in WSAs can change from a CCH interval to the successive. This is the case, for example, of the EDCA parameter set and of the advertised SCH; the SCH may be changed if it is perceived as interfered because of the arrival of a new WAVE provider that is using it under the same radio coverage. There is no feedback on WSA successful reception by interested vehicles; so, the provider cannot know if its BSS advertisement has failed due to either adverse channel conditions or WSA collisions with interfering trafc simultaneously transmitted on CCH, e.g., safety messages or beacons. While safety messages are triggered by the occurrence of a hazardous event on the road, so they are only sporadically transmitted, beacons can be especially harmful due to the fact that they are routinely transmitted by all vehicles and at every CCH interval.2 The consequences of a lack of received WSA can be negative under many aspects. On one hand, WSA reception also serves the purpose of providing link quality information through signal strength measurements at the receiver (IEEE P1609.3 SWG, 2010), which can infer quality and stability of the connection to a given provider. This information can be used by each receiver to determine whether to attempt accessing an advertised BSS. On the other hand, a failure in the WSA reception prevents nonsafety data exchange within the context of a BSS during the next SCH interval, given that potential users would be unaware of the BSS setup. The impossibility to exchange data on a given SCH interval could be particularly detrimental for short-lived connections expected in case of V2R communications. Things are made more difcult in an urban setting, where the radio obstructions caused by buildings could make BSS initialization and subsequent data exchange even more critical, by further reducing the RSU coverage area and consequently connection lifetimes. This complex context constitutes the underlying motivation of the proposed study. To improve reliability of the WAVE advertisement procedure, the 1609.3 standard only suggests providers to transmit multiple

3. Background and motivations The WAVE multichannel organization allows a provider to reserve a given SCH frequency for its BSS setup by broadcasting WSA frames to one-hop distant nodes during the previous CCH
2 Although in literature there are many examples of adaptation of beacon generation rate (Schmidt et al., 2010; Sommer et al., 2011a) to reduce the channel load, in this study we refer to the worst case scenario.

Please cite this article as: Campolo C, et al. Augmenting Vehicle-to-Roadside connectivity in multi-channel vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2012.04.001

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Fig. 3. WSA frame format (adapted from (IEEE P1609.3 SWG, 2010)).

WSA copies per CCH interval. Intuitively, the higher the number of WSAs the higher the probability that nearby vehicles detect the RSU. Nevertheless, repeated WSA transmissions would contribute to congestion on CCH. This is a serious concern because of the already scarce CCH capacity due to channel switching. Therefore, WSA repeats per CCH interval should be carefully tuned not to penalize beacon and safety message transmissions on the same channel. The driving idea of the techniques proposed in this paper is to augment efciency and robustness of the WAVE advertisement procedure by making the best of the two standard types of messages, WSAs and beacons, transmitted on CCH in order to spread the RSU awareness among vehicles. Specically, they all rely on cooperation among vehicles which use their routinely transmitted beacons as additional delivery vectors of information about advertised BSSs and their parameters and WSA repetitions to exploit time diversity. Early germs of such techniques to the purpose of improving WAVE advertisement procedures can be found in Campolo et al. (2009), where we proposed to modify the WSA messages to let providers propagate SCH reservation information of nearby BSSs to two-hop neighboring nodes in order to improve the service channel selection procedures, and in Campolo and Molinaro (2011a), where we demonstrated the effectiveness of piggybacking information about the BSSs SCH onto beacons in a highway scenario. In this paper, steps forward are taken by designing additional techniques that spread full information about the BSSs services and connection parameters useful for beneting from Internet applications, and also leverage the recently standardised OCB communication mode.

Fig. 4. Extended beacon frame with piggybacked WSAs ChannelNumber.

reported here for the sake of completeness, since it is used as a benchmark for the newly introduced solutions. Before over-the-air transmission of its own beacon, each vehicle, that has already received a WSA from a nearby RSU, piggybacks in its beacon a one-byte eld of the received WSA. Specically, it only includes the ChannelNumber eld (IEEE P1609.3 SWG, 2010) that identies the SCH where the advertised BSS will be initialized (Fig. 4). Piggybacking can be done by exploiting the WSMP header extension elds provided in Annex G of IEEE 1609.3 (IEEE P1609.3 SWG, 2010), while being fully compliant with the 802.11p/WAVE specications. Vehicles, detecting WSAs from different providers, only piggyback the information received by the nearest RSU. Distance from RSUs can be easily computed since (i) each vehicle is equipped with a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver, hence knows about its current location, and (ii) every provider includes its own GPS position in the Latitude and Longitude elds of the WSA frame (IEEE P1609.3 SWG, 2010). Broadcasting of such extended beacons helps nearby vehicles that missed transmitted WSAs during a given CCH interval to become aware of the RSU presence and tune onto the advertised SCH. Specically, according to the SCHp scheme, the following cases can occur: vehicles directly detect a nearby RSU by receiving a WSA frame from it; hence, they can tune to the advertised SCH and exchange data with the RSU; vehicles miss all WSAs from nearby RSUs during a given CCH interval, but they receive at least one beacon frame piggybacking SCH information; hence, they can tune on the SCH advertised in the beacon; vehicles detect information about a nearby RSU neither directly from WSAs nor through beacons, so they remain tuned on the CCH also during the successive SCH interval. The main advantage of the SCHp scheme is that it keeps the additional overhead very low: only 1 byte per transmitted

4. The proposed set of augmented WAVE advertisement procedures 4.1. Exploiting space diversity: the SCH piggybacking scheme In the rst scheme, referred to as SCHp (that stands for SCHpiggybacking), SCH information is carried not only in RSU-generated WSAs as envisioned by the standard, but it is also piggybacked onto beacons generated by vehicles aware of the RSU presence. This is the scheme we proposed in Campolo and Molinaro (2011a) that is

Please cite this article as: Campolo C, et al. Augmenting Vehicle-to-Roadside connectivity in multi-channel vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2012.04.001

C. Campolo et al. / Journal of Network and Computer Applications ] (]]]]) ]]] ]]]

Fig. 5. Enhanced beacon frame with piggybacked WSA.

Fig. 6. eSCHp scheme.

beacon. Its main weakness is that vehicles only become aware of the advertised SCH where the BSS will be initialized, but they miss all other BSS information, e.g., the offered services, the EDCA parameters set, conguration parameters for connecting to the Internet. Therefore, they cannot exchange IP-based data with remote hosts in the Internet; however, it is reasonable to assume that when switching to the SCH they can exchange WSMP packets with the RSU3 by relying on the OCB communication mode. The RSU can broadcast locally relevant information, as for example public utility messages, like point-of-interest notication, e-maps/trafc congestion updates, proximity advertising and marketing segments (e.g., movie clips from the nearby theaters, prices of nearby gasoline stations), which may be exchanged outside the context of the BSS through WSMP packets. 4.2. Exploiting space diversity: the WSA piggybacking scheme and the hybrid piggybacking scheme In order to remove the limit of the SCHp scheme and let vehicles exchange IP-based data with any node in the Internet when there is a nearby RSU, we propose the WSAp scheme (that stands for WSA piggybacking) that makes vehicles fully aware about the operational parameters of advertised BSSs. According to it, vehicles that have received a WSA can piggyback the entire WSA frame onto their transmitted beacons, Fig. 5. So vehicles missing WSAs transmitted by nearby RSUs, but receiving at least one extended beacon frame, can tune on the advertised SCH and exchange with the RSU not only OCB packets but also IPbased data. Certainly, this scheme helps in spreading full-awareness among vehicles in the RSU neighborhood but it would suffer from high overhead4 and cause congestion on CCH in the case all vehicles decide to append the entire WSA in their beacons.
3 It should be noticed that among vehicles that have missed a WSA from the RSU but have received an extended beacon from a nearby vehicle, there could be some with a very bad link towards the RSU. These vehicles would be unable to exchange data with RSU in the next SCH interval. In this case, relay-based solutions would help to support V2R communication, as we have preliminarily investigated in Campolo and Molinaro (2011b). Design and analysis of relaying techniques are outside the scope of this work. 4 The WSA size is variable; it depends on the type and number of offered services. Typical lengths range between 100 and 400 bytes, if services are offered over IPv6 (Kenney, 2009). The typical size of beacons is 100 bytes (Xu et al., 2004).

Therefore, we foresee a simple probability-based technique coupled with the WSAp scheme, according to which only a subset of vehicles piggyback WSAs into their beacons with a given probability. Each vehicle receiving a WSA from a nearby RSU and with a pending beacon waiting for being transmitted in the current CCH interval, extracts a random number uniformly distributed between 0 and 1. If the number is greater than a given piggybacking probability p, the vehicle piggybacks the WSA frame, otherwise it sends a legacy beacon. A probability p equal to 1 corresponds to the case in which all vehicles detecting a nearby BSS piggyback the received WSA, a value of p equal to 0 means that no vehicles enforce piggybacking. Increasing the size of transmitted beacons can have another side effect: because of the bounded duration of the CCH interval, given the channel switching mechanism, some transmissions of these longer beacon frames could not be accommodated, due to CCH expiry time. Furthermore, longer beacon frames are more prone to channel errors under the assumption of independent bit errors. Failed beacon transmissions could be detrimental for cooperative applications that rely on up-to-date information conveyed by all vehicles into beacons. In order to improve the number of SCH-aware vehicles, we further enhance the WSAp scheme by combining it with SCHp. The resulting hybrid scheme lets those vehicles detecting a nearby RSU and not piggybacking the entire WSA (because the extracted probability is greater than the dened p), piggyback only the ChannelNumber eld into their own beacons.

4.3. Exploiting channel diversity: the enhanced SCH piggybacking scheme In order to reduce probability of congestion on the bounded CCH interval and increase full RSU-awareness, we propose a further scheme, referred to as eSCHp (that stands for enhanced SCH piggybacking). It is intended to combine the low-overhead SCHp scheme with the transmission of an additional delayed WSA at the beginning of the SCH interval. Figure 6 shows the resulting data transmission scheme on CCH and SCH interval. Vehicles receiving a beacon with piggybacked SCH information can switch on the advertised SCH and wait for the additional WSA sent by the RSU. This WSA is transmitted at the highest priority allowed by the 802.11p standard in order to reduce contention

Please cite this article as: Campolo C, et al. Augmenting Vehicle-to-Roadside connectivity in multi-channel vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2012.04.001

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Table 1 Main features of the compared protocols. Feature SCH-awareness Full-awareness Piggybacking scope Overhead per beacon SCHp Yes No All nodes 1 byte (ChannelNumber) WSAp Hybrid WSAp eSCHp Yes Yes All nodes 1 byte (ChannelNumber)

Yes Yes Yes Yes A subset of nodes with probability p All nodes 1WSA with probability p  1WSA with probability p  1 byte (ChannelNumber) with probability 1-p No No

Overhead on SCH

No

Yes, 1 WSA per RSU

with other competing trafc on the SCH. According to this solution, the following cases can occur: vehicles directly detect a nearby RSU by receiving at least one WSA from it during the CCH interval; hence, they can tune to the advertised SCH and exchange both IP-based and OCB mode packets with the RSU; vehicles miss all WSAs transmitted from nearby RSUs, both on the CCH and the SCH, but they receive at least one beacon packet piggybacking the SCH information. They can tune on the advertised SCH, but, since they missed all other BSS information, they are only allowed to exchange OCB mode packets; vehicles detect at least one beacon on the CCH and the delayed WSA on the SCH; they become fully aware of the BSS operational parameters and can exchange any kind of data with the RSU; vehicles detect information about a nearby RSU neither directly nor through beacons; hence, they remain tuned into the CCH also during the SCH interval. Beside improving the RSU-awareness among vehicles missing WSAs in the CCH interval, this scheme has a further benet: vehicles receiving a delayed WSA can better infer the quality of the radio link towards the RSU. In fact, the WSAs received on CCH may not give a reliable indication of the SCH link quality (Kenney, 2009); this is especially true when the CCH is particularly congested because of several beacon and WSA transmissions.

Fig. 7. RSUs positions in the Manhattan-like grid topology. The three simulated cases are distinguished by colors: 6-RSUs displayed as red units; 10-RSUs: red black; 14-RSUs: red black green. (For interpretation of the references to color in this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

5. Performance evaluation We analyze the performance of the proposed schemes against the legacy WAVE advertisement procedure through simulations carried out in ns-2 (NS-2, Network Simulator tool, 2011). For the sake of clarity, the main features of the compared schemes are summarized in Table 1. An urban area is modeled as a 750 m-wide grid including 5 5 two-lane roads, spaced 150 m apart. A variable number of RSUs (6, 10, 14) is positioned at crossroads, as illustrated in Fig. 7, and provide connectivity to vehicles. Considering the hostile propagation conditions in urban environments (due to signal fading, attenuation, and diffraction), the RSUs must be deployed at strategic places, such as at crossroads, with the aim of maximizing the coverage, while keeping the infrastructure cost as low as possible. The mobility traces are generated by SUMO (2011) for 451 vehicles moving at a mean speed of 60 km/h. Mobility traces are given as inputs to ns-2. To improve realism of simulations, we use the ns-2 version in Chen et al. (2007), which encompasses computation of the cumulative Signal-to-Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR) and the modulation scheme at the receiver. The received signal strength is computed by considering a statistical component modeling fading, and a deterministic one accounting for urban obstructions. The statistical component follows the Nakagami distribution (Nakagami, 1960), which is widely used in the vehicular environment (Taliwal et al., 2004). In

Fig. 8. Logical simulative architecture.

order to model medium fading conditions the fading intensity parameter, m, of the Nakagami distribution is set equal to 3. Quite recently some models have been proposed in literature to account for obstructions in urban scenarios (Giordano et al., 2010); Sommer et al., 2011b; Pilosu et al., 2011; Scopigno and Cozzetti, 2010). In CORNER (Giordano et al., 2010) an analytical model is validated by ray-tracing and by measurements, but it applies only to specic square-corner topologies. In Pilosu et al. (2011) RADII is proposed as a methodology to automatically segment any complex topology into regions where an analytical model describes propagation phenomena as deduced by ray-tracing. However, RADII is very recent and lacks an integration with network simulators; additionally, it requires pre-processing for any specic urban map. For these reasons the model proposed in Scopigno and Cozzetti (2010) is adopted in this paper. It considers an additional pathloss component (extra-attenuation ai) accounting for obstruction by buildings. As shown in Fig. 8, an intermediate layer is added into the simulation architecture between the SUMO and the ns-2

Please cite this article as: Campolo C, et al. Augmenting Vehicle-to-Roadside connectivity in multi-channel vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2012.04.001

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layer, to facilitate the off-line classication of possible mutual node positions with respect to buildings, in a regular square grid. More in details, coordinates of vehicles are regressed into a discrete version. In this way, this information can be computed off-line and appended in the le containing node positions. This method makes easier and faster for the network simulator to perform comparisons. A discrete math is then deployed on the discrete coordinates to classify mutual node positions with respect to the obstacles. The classication function is embedded in the network simulator and can be used in real-time without major impacts on the computational load of simulations (Scopigno and Cozzetti, 2010). It is computational negligible and permits to identify, based on coordinates, if two nodes are in Line-of-Sight (LoS), Near-Line-of-Sight (NLoS), and non-Line-of-Sight (nLoS). Line-of-Sight (LoS) conditions apply to vehicles in the same road (vehicles S and A in Fig. 9), NearLine-of-Sight (NLoS) to vehicles on the legs of a crossing not farther than a building (vehicles S and B in Fig. 9), and non-Line-of-Sight (nLoS) to all the other cases (vehicles S and C in Fig. 9). The corresponding extra-attenuation ai assumes the following different values: a0 0 dB in case of LoS; a1 13 dB, in case of NLoS; a2 30 dB, in case of nLoS. While the proposed model is somehow simplistic and does not completely reect the analytical model of CORNER or RADII, it has the advantage of adding an automatic mutual positions classication that simplies integration into ns-2. Additionally, it has been widely justied, by measurements from literature, in Scopigno and Cozzetti (2010) and further validated in Campolo et al. (2011a) by ray-tracing simulations. The WAVE multi-channel organization and the alternating channel switching, with 50-ms long CCH and SCH intervals, are built on the top of the 802.11p PHY and MAC layers, whose parameters are summarized in Table 2. Unless differently specied, the data rate is 6 Mbps, which is the most common value suggested in the literature (Jiang et al., 2008). The transmission power is set to 7 dBm, among the values allowed by the standard. With this power value, the maximum distance at which packet reception is still possible is 150 m, by assuming deterministic path loss. Since 802.11p/WAVE only mandates the use of the highest priority for safety packets, we set the AC of beacons and WSAs to be AC_BE according to suggestions in SAE International, DSRC Implementation Guide (2010). The number of WSA repeats is a variable number in our study. The standard does not specify how providers schedule WSA transmissions during the CCH interval; we assume that they transmit at random time instants in order to increase time diversity (Campolo et al., 2011b) compared to the case in which they transmit WSAs at the CCH interval beginning. The same generation policy applies for beacons.

Moreover, we consider the application layer aware of channel switching, so that it passes beacons to the MAC layer only during the CCH interval, as suggested in Qi et al. (2009). The beacon packet size is set to 100 bytes (Xu et al., 2004), while the WSA packet size is set to 500 bytes, except in the case where we investigate the inuence of the WSA size. We added 178 bytes accounting for security overhead (e.g., digital signature plus a certicate) to both packet types (IEEE 1609.2, 2006). Beacon generation rate is set to 10 Hz (Schmidt et al., 2010), this means they are transmitted once per CCH interval. 5.1. Impact of obstructions on legacy BSS advertisement The rst set of results aims at evaluating the impact of obstructions on the connectivity degree guaranteed by the legacy BSS advertisement procedure with WSA repetitions (IEEE 1609.4, 2011) under a variable number of deployed RSUs. The metric used for this purpose is the average percentage of connected users, i.e., the percentage of vehicles that have received (at least) one WSA frame from a nearby RSU during the CCH interval and can exchange both IPv6 and WSMP data packets during the successive SCH interval. The analysis is carried out when the CCH trafc load is composed of (i) only WSAs transmitted by RSUs (Fig. 10), and (ii) WSAs and beacons respectively transmitted by RSUs and vehicles (Fig. 11), for a different number of RSUs (6, 10, 14)positioned according to the placement scheme in Fig. 7. The results achieved when using the model with obstructions (dashed curves labeled with w obstructions) are compared with the ones achieved when considering the Nakagami model without extra attenuation due to obstructions (continuous curves labeled with w/o obstructions). The detrimental effect of obstructions is obvious in Fig. 10, and also the positive effect of an increase in the number of WSA
Table 2 802.11p PHY and MAC parameters (IEEE Std, 2010). Category PHY Parameter Frequency Channel bandwidth Transmission power Power monitor threshold Noise oor Carrier sense threshold Slot time SIFS time Header length (Th) aCWmin AIFS number (AIFSN) Value 5.9 GHz 10 MHz 7 dBm 120 dBm 99 dBm 95 dBm 16 ms 32 ms 40 ms 15 6

MAC

Fig. 9. Obstructions in the considered urban topology and corresponding attenuation factors.

Please cite this article as: Campolo C, et al. Augmenting Vehicle-to-Roadside connectivity in multi-channel vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2012.04.001

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Fig. 10. Legacy: percentage of connected users vs. WSA repeats when varying the number of RSUs in absence of interfering trafc on CCH.

enhanced BSS advertisement procedure (SCHp) when varying the penetration of VANET-equipped vehicles on the roads. Simulations are carried out with a variable percentage of vehicles equipped with 802.11p/WAVE transceivers, and consequently with a variable number of vehicles transmitting beacons and being potentially capable to detect the WAVE advertisements. In Figs. 12, 13, and 14, the SCHp scheme is evaluated versus the penetration rate, when varying the WSA repeats, and for 6, 10, and 14 RSUs, respectively. The two sets of curves, dashed and continuous, are respectively labeled as fully aware and SCH aware. Fully-aware vehicles are made aware of all the BSS operational parameters, included the SCH where a BSS will be initialized, by receiving at least one WSA transmitted by a nearby RSU, as also foreseen by the legacy WAVE advertisement scheme. SCH-aware vehicles are made aware of the SCH where BSS services will be delivered by receiving a WSA or a beacon piggybacking the ChannelNumber eld; hence, this percentage accounts for the improvement achieved thanks to the enforcement of the SCHp scheme. The results achieved by the legacy scheme are not explicitly reported in Figs. 1214 in order to reduce cluttering of plots, since they are very close to the results reported for the SCHp fully aware case. The RSU detection capability, through the direct WSA reception of the legacy approach, decreases as the penetration rate

Fig. 11. Legacy: percentage of connected users vs. WSA repeats when varying the number of RSUs in presence of beaconing trafc on CCH.

repeats. The most signicant gain is achieved when passing from 1 to 2 repeats, because of the achieved better time diversity in transmission attempts. Under the Nakagami model and with 4 WSA repeats, 10 RSUs are able to guarantee full connectivity over the topology, i.e., each vehicle is under the coverage of at least one RSU. Conversely, under the model with obstructions, buildings affect connectivity. This is especially true when considering the scenario with the least redundant infrastructure coverage, 6 RSUs. In this case, when RSUs transmit 5 WSA repeats, connectivity is provided to less than 80% of vehicles. In Fig. 11, as expected, due to higher load on CCHboth WSAs and beacons are transmittedthe connectivity performance signicantly decreases. Full connectivity is never guaranteed on the simulated topology. However, in this case, obstructions surprisingly have a positive effect on connectivity. They, in fact, keep signal propagation and interference low. This is especially appreciable under high trafc load. Henceforth, simulations will consider the Nakagami model with extra-attenuation due to obstructions. 5.2. Impact of VANET penetration rate: SCHp vs. legacy The second set of results better analyzes the impact of beaconing trafc on the legacy and the proposed piggybacking-

Fig. 12. Legacy (fully aware) vs. SCHp: percentage of connected users vs. VANETequipped vehicles penetration rate when varying WSA repeats with 6 RSUs.

Fig. 13. Legacy (fully aware) vs. SCHp: percentage of connected users vs. VANETequipped vehicles penetration rate when varying WSA repeats with 10 RSUs.

Please cite this article as: Campolo C, et al. Augmenting Vehicle-to-Roadside connectivity in multi-channel vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2012.04.001

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Table 3 Data rate settings. Data rate 3 Mbps 6 Mbps Modulation BPSK QPSK SINR Threshold (dB) 5 8

Table 4 SCHp: reduction in the percentage of vehicles reached by transmitted beacons at 3 Mbps when compared to 6 Mbps, with 6 RSUs and 4 WSA repeats. WSA size (bytes) 100 300 500 800 Fig. 14. Legacy (fully aware) vs. SCHp: percentage of connected users vs. VANETequipped vehicles penetration rate when varying WSA repeats with 14 RSUs. R 3 Mbps w.r.t. R 6 Mbps (%) 21.27 20.92 20.53 19.94

Fig. 15. Legacy vs. SCHp: percentage of connected users vs. WSA size with variable data rate, 6 RSUs, and 4 WSA repeats.

increases, because of higher congestion on the CCH caused by beacons, whatever the number of RSUs is. The redundancy and the better spatial diversity achieved by spreading the SCH information through beacons in SCHp helps in counteracting the WSA losses due to the harsh propagation conditions and collisions. Notwithstanding, it can be observed that the number of SCH-aware vehicles either tends to saturate or to decrease (e.g., for 1 WSA repeat, 6 RSUs) as the penetration rate increases. As an example, for 6 and 10 RSUs, it can be clearly noticed that the maximum number of SCH-aware vehicles is achieved for a penetration rate equal to 50%, then the connectivity saturates or slightly decreases. Such a trend witnesses the high congestion experienced on CCH when the number of vehicles transmitting beacons increases, which may reduce the benets of the proposed SCHp scheme. Nevertheless, whatever the penetration rate, the SCHp scheme increases the percentage of SCHaware users with respect to the legacy approach. 5.3. Impact of transmission data rate: SCHp vs. legacy In Fig. 15 the SCHp performance is evaluated when considering the two lowest data rates allowed in the 802.11p standard: 3 Mbps (continuous lines) and 6 Mbps (dashed lines) and when only 6 RSUs are deployed on the topology. Lower data rates require lower SINR thresholds for successful frame reception

(Table 3). On one hand, a lower data rate is less vulnerable to interferencethus is expected to improve the connectivity performancebut, on the other hand, the longer transmission delay hinders the accommodation of all the scheduled WSA and beacon transmissions during the CCH interval (the channel capacity is halved). Achieved results show that for the legacy scheme, when only WSAs are transmitted on CCH, the lowest data rate guarantees higher percentage of connected users. In fact, without interfering beacons, all the scheduled WSAs can be accommodated during the CCH interval. Moreover, in this case, results are not affected by the WSA size. Conversely, when adding beaconing trafc, the lowest data rate has a detrimental effect on the connectivity performance of legacy and SCHp schemes; both percentages of fully aware (i.e., legacy) and SCH aware vehicles signicantly decrease. The data rate reduction implies, in fact, a lower number of transmitted packets (both beacons and WSAs) on CCH due to the higher probability that packets are dropped5 due to channel expiry time. The reduction in the number of transmitted beacons not only reduces the percentage of SCH-aware vehicles, but has also negative effects on the neighborhood awareness requested by cooperative cruise control applications. In fact, reducing the number of transmitted beacons causes a reduction in the percentage of vehicles that receive updated position and kinematics information from their neighborhood. Results in Table 4 show the percentage reduction in the number of vehicles reached by beacons at a data rate of 3 Mbps when compared to 6 Mbps. Such a reduction becomes more severe as the WSA size increases, because the longer packet transmission delayseither due to a lower data rate or to longer packetscannot be accommodated during the CCH interval. Additional tests performed with 12 Mbps, not shown in the paper, demonstrate more signicant performance worsening because of the higher vulnerability to channel errors. In summary, the 6 Mbps data rate suggested in Jiang et al. (2008) turns out to be the best choice even when considering the WAVE channel switching.

5.4. Legacy vs. beacon-enhanced schemes: connectivity analysis In this subsection we present the comparison between the legacy and the proposed solutions, SCHp, WSAp, hybrid and enhanced piggybacking schemes in terms of achieved connectivity. The most critical scenario is considered when only 6 RSUs are deployed on the topology.
5 Due to the short-relevance time of information conveyed in WSAs and beacons, non transmitted packets at the end of the channel interval are dropped and replaced with newly generated packets in the subsequent CCH interval.

Please cite this article as: Campolo C, et al. Augmenting Vehicle-to-Roadside connectivity in multi-channel vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2012.04.001

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Fig. 16. WSAp: percentage of fully aware users vs. WSA repeats when varying piggybacking probability p with 6 RSUs, WSA size 500 bytes.

The hybrid scheme lets all vehicles detecting an RSUand not appending the entire WSA to their beaconsto piggyback only SCH information, thus increasing the percentage of SCH-aware vehicles when decreasing p. The highest percentage of SCH-aware vehicles is achieved by the low-overhead SCHp scheme. These users cannot exploit IP-based services, but can benet of services offered by the RSU in OCB mode. On the other hand, hybrid and WSAp show the same results as regards the fully awareness; the higher p the higher the percentage of fully aware vehicles that receive extended beacons in the beacon-aided schemes. The WSA size has also a signicant impact on the performance: whatever the deployed advertisement scheme, the higher the WSA size the lower the connectivity performance is. The increased WSA size, coupled with the bounded CCH interval duration, may hinder the transmission of all scheduled WSAs and extended beacons as the p probability increases, thus causing degradation in the connectivity degree. Results reported in Fig. 18 show the performance of the eSCHp scheme that couples the simple SCHp scheme with the repetition of a delayed WSA at the beginning of the SCH interval. Thanks to channel diversity, the percentage of vehicles which are fully aware of the operational parameters of a nearby BSS increases as compared to the SCHp scheme. The same percentage of SCH-aware vehicles is recorded since eSCHp relies on the same beacon-aided

Fig. 17. Hybrid vs. legacy and SCHp schemes: percentage of connected users vs. WSA size with 6 RSUs and 4 WSA repeats.

Figure 16 shows the percentage of vehicles which are made fully aware of the BSS operational parameters by the WSAp scheme when varying the piggybacking probability p according to which vehicles piggyback (or not) over beacons the entire WSA frame received from a nearby RSU. The two sets of curves, continuous and dashed, respectively refer to the percentage of fully aware vehicles that only receive at least one WSA directly from a nearby RSU (curves labeled as direct), and to the case in which they either receive a direct WSA or a piggybacked-over-beacon WSA (curves labeled as beaconaided) following the WSAp rules. WSAp performance increases with the number of WSA repetitions and with the piggybacking probability p. With four WSA repeats, also a small piggybacking probability (p 0.25) is capable to achieve the same connectivity degree (about 70%) offered by Legacy in Fig. 10 under the same conditions but without beaconing trafc. Such a nding suggests that WSAp can improve the RSU-awareness by counteracting the detrimental effects of collisions between WSAs and beacons. The hybrid scheme is analyzed in Fig. 17 for different piggybacking probabilities p and in comparison with legacy (same results as in curves labeled with SCHp, fully aware, direct), SCHp, and WSAp (same results as in curves labeled with hybrid, fully aware). By combining SCHp and WSAp features, the hybrid scheme is able to outperform the other schemes.

Fig. 18. eSCHp vs. SCHp: percentage of connected users vs. WSA repeats with variable WSA size and 6 RSUs (delayed WSA transmitted at 6 Mbps).

Fig. 19. eSCHp vs. SCHp: percentage of connected users vs. WSA repeats with variable WSA size and 6 RSUs (delayed WSA transmitted at 3 Mbps).

Please cite this article as: Campolo C, et al. Augmenting Vehicle-to-Roadside connectivity in multi-channel vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2012.04.001

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Table 5 Effectiveness and efciency comparison between the proposed protocols and the legacy solution. Scheme Metric\p SCH-awareness (%) Full-awareness (%) Overhead on CCH (%) Transmitted beacons (%) Reached vehicles reduction (%) Legacy SCHp WSAp 0.25 71.13 71.13 19.96 93.86 7.62 0.5 78.47 78.47 34.59 91.47 13.29 0.75 82.08 82.08 45.24 89.06 17.84 1 84.26 84.26 53.79 86.46 21.31 Hybrid WSAp 0.25 91.93 71.13 20.03 93.88 7.62 0.5 89.82 78.47 34.63 91.47 13.29 0.75 87.1 82.08 45.25 89.06 17.84 1 84.26 84.26 53.8 86.46 21.31 eSCHp

53.6 96.01

93.8 53.6 0.23 96.01 0

93.8 58.25 0.23 96.01 0

scheme used by SCHp. Moreover, results in Fig. 19 show that slightly further improvements can be achieved by letting RSUs transmit the delayed WSA at 3 Mbps, differently from the 6 Mbps rate used to transmit WSAs during the CCH interval. This increases robustness and range of the WSA transmission on the SCH. It can be further noticed that the delayed WSA can be used to reduce the number of WSA repeats transmitted during the CCH interval, by guaranteeing the same percentage of fully aware vehicles. As an example, the eSCHp scheme with 3 WSA repeats on the CCH and a delayed WSA transmitted at 6 Mbps on the SCH achieves the same performance achieved when the SCHp scheme is deployed with 4 WSA repeats, and even higher when it is transmitted at 3 Mbps. Such a result suggests reducing the number of WSA repeats on the CCH, to keep the CCH less congested. This could be particularly useful under heavy trafc load on the CCH and in presence of several WAVE providers, for example in the case of a platoon of vehicles where several pairs of OBUs exchange data. 5.5. Overall comparison Results reported in the previous subsections focused on the effectiveness of the proposed schemes in terms of connectivity when varying different parameters which could affect performance: penetration rate, WSA packet size and number of repeats, and data rate. Here, we aim instead to analyze the efciency of the proposed schemes. To this purpose, we dene an additional metric, the overhead on CCH, computed as the ratio between the number of bytes added to beacons by the proposed piggybacking schemes and the total number of bytes transmitted by vehicles in their beacons. Results are shown in Table 5, for a data rate equal to 6 Mbps, WSA size of 500 bytes and a number of WSA repeats equal to 4. In order to better gure out the trade-off between effectiveness and efciency of the proposed schemes, the connectivity values, both in terms of SCH-awareness and full-awareness, are also reported in the same table. Results show that the SCHp and eSCHp scheme incurs the lowest, and almost negligible, overhead, by achieving the highest number of SCH-aware users. It has to be noticed that the eSCHp scheme incurs an additional overhead on the SCH, because of the transmission of the delayed WSA by each provider. Specically, for a WSA size of 500 bytes and a data rate of 3 and 6 Mbps, the fraction of SCH bandwidth occupied by the delayed WSAs is negligible and respectively equal to 1.5% and 3% of the useful SCH interval duration.6 As already discussed in previous subsections, the most performing schemes in terms of achieved number of fully aware users are the WSAp and hybrid piggybacking schemes with the highest value of probability p. More in detail, the hybrid
6 Transmissions are not allowed at the beginning of the CCH and SCH intervals for a 4 ms-long guard period accounting for switching delays (IEEE 1609.4, 2011).

piggybacking scheme achieves a higher number of SCH aware users as compared to WSAp, by experiencing almost the same overhead. Although it seems tempting to increase the piggybacking probability to further improve full awareness of vehicles about nearby RSUs, it should be noticed that increasing p could have a negative impact on channel load. In fact, both the WSAp and hybrid schemes make the beacon size to increase, because of the piggybacking of the entire WSA. The resulting overhead increases with p and it is not negligible, reaching more than 50% with p equal to 1. The main impact of the high overhead is on the delivery of beacons, whose periodical reception is required by cooperative cruise control applications. In order to evaluate this impact, for all the proposed schemes we compute the following additional metrics: (i) the percentage of beacons effectively transmitted by vehicles over the number of scheduled beacons, i.e., one per CCH interval per vehicle (labeled in Table 5 as transmitted beacons); (ii) the reduction in the percentage of vehicles reached by beacons w.r.t. to the legacy scheme (labeled in Table 5 as reached vehicles reduction). It can be observed that the WSAp and hybrid schemes lead to a reduction of the number of transmitted beacons as compared to the legacy scheme, values pass from 96% to 86% with p equal to 1. The SCHp and the eSCHp schemes, instead, exhibit the same performance as the legacy approach. In addition, a reduction in the number of successfully received beacons is experienced with the probabilistic schemes. When p is equal to 1 a reduction of about 21% is achieved, this directly translates in the reduced reliability of beacons, with a consequent potential bad effect on cooperative cruise applications requiring accurate neighborhood awareness. Nonetheless the high benets of the hybrid scheme both in terms of fully aware and SCH aware vehicles, the additional overhead incurred by this scheme, with the resulting reduced beacon reliability, even when low piggybacking probabilities are considered, cannot be acceptable. Such a nding let us renounce to this scheme and prefer the eSCHp, exploiting the simplicity of the low-overhead SCHp scheme and further improving its connectivity performance through the delayed WSA transmitted on SCH.

6. Discussion and conclusions In this work we have investigated the feasibility of V2R communications, when jointly considering features and constraints of multi-channel operations envisioned by IEEE 802.11p/WAVE and realistic settings for signal propagation and vehicle mobility in challenging and crowded urban environments. In order to increase the number of vehicles able to make the best of a short-lived connectivity to nearby RSUs, we proposed a set of solutions that exploits the repetition of BSS advertisements during the CCH interval, the piggybacking of BSSs parameters over beacons, and the introduction of BSS advertisement during the SCH interval.

Please cite this article as: Campolo C, et al. Augmenting Vehicle-to-Roadside connectivity in multi-channel vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2012.04.001

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The easy-to-deploy proposed solutions leverage packets already available on the CCH interval, so they can be enforced by introducing slight modications to the standard and by exploiting the lowoverhead and exible WSMP packets. Results show that the introduction of the WSA transmission at the beginning of the SCH interval, coupled with the beacon-aided spreading of BSS information among nearby vehicles, as foreseen by the eSCHp scheme, successfully achieves the twofold purpose of improving RSU-awareness, by overcoming effects of WSA losses due to collisions and channel impairments, and reducing channel load incurred instead by piggybacking the entire WSA. As an additional benet, it does not negatively affect the delivery of beacons, crucial for cooperative cruise control applications. Moreover, the beacon-aided mechanism allows to increase the percentage of vehicles that could benet of the widely expected location-relevant and non IP-based services by relying on the OCB mode provided in the 802.11p/WAVE standard. The WSA transmission during the SCH interval has the further great potential to allow vehicles to rely on more reliable link quality assessment and to enforce channel- and rate-adaptive transmissions, which will be subject matters for our future works. References
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Please cite this article as: Campolo C, et al. Augmenting Vehicle-to-Roadside connectivity in multi-channel vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2012.04.001