International Journal of Vehicular Telematics and Infotainment Systems

Volume 1 • Issue 2 • July-December 2017

A Review of Congestion Control

Schemes for Vehicular Ad-Hoc
Network (VANET) Communication
Samuel Ibukun Olotu, Federal University of Technology Akure, Akure, Nigeria
Bolanle Adefowoke Ojokoh, Federal University of Technology Akure, Akure, Nigeria
Olumide Sunday Adewale, Federal University of Technology Akure, Akure, Nigeria

ABSTRACT

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are built on top of self-organizing networks, known as
Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET). In VANET, each vehicle equipped with communication devices
represents a node and is allowed to send and receive safety messages through wireless communication
channels. These messages are either periodic (beacons) or event-driven. Beacons are transmitted
periodically while the event-driven messages are generated when an abnormal condition or an
imminent danger is detected. The event-driven messages should be delivered to neighbouring nodes
with high reliability and limit time as a single delayed or lost message could result in loss of lives. In
dense network, the periodic messages broadcast lead to broadcast storm/blind flooding problem in
VANETs. It is very important to keep the communication channel free from congestion in order to
ensure timely and reliable delivery of event-driven safety messages. This study presents a review of
existing congestion control schemes for VANETs with the aim of discussing the contributions and
drawbacks of the algorithms.

Keywords
Beacon Messages, Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), Event-Driven Messages, IEEE 802.11p.,
Intelligent Transport System (ITS), Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE)

INTRODUCTION

The progress of the transportation industry is an essential factor in the development of our society.
It simply makes the relation between different economic branches possible and efficient. However,
the increase in the number of vehicles has also brought an increase in the number of accidents
and human fatalities (Stanica, 2011). According to World Health Organization (2013), road traffic
accidents lead to about 1.24 million deaths worldwide, and 92% of them occur in middle-income
and low-income countries. This challenge has led to the development of new transportation systems
such as the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is the
integration of telecommunication and information technologies to improve the safety and efficiency in
transportation systems (Jarupan & Ekici, 2011). One of the potential architectures for ITS is vehicular
ad hoc network (VANET) (Bouk, Kim, Ahmed, & Kim, 2015).
A VANET is a self-organized, multi-purpose, service oriented communication network enabling
vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside infrastructure communication for the purpose of exchanging
messages to ensure an efficient and comfortable traffic system on roads (Biswas, 2012). In VANET,

DOI: 10.4018/IJVTIS.2017070101

Copyright © 2017, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.


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each vehicle equipped with communication devices represents a node and is allowed to send and
receive safety messages through wireless communication channels. These messages are either periodic
(beacons) or event-driven (Sattari, Noor, & Keshavarz, 2012). Beacon messages are sent periodically
by vehicles to inform their neighbour vehicles of their condition such as position, direction and speed.
These messages are simply used by the neighbouring vehicles (nodes) to be aware of their environment
as well as preventing potential dangers. The event-driven safety messages are generated when an
abnormal condition or an imminent danger is detected and are disseminated within a certain range
with higher priority. The event-driven safety messages should be delivered to neighbouring node by
high reliability and limited time. A single delayed or lost message could result in loss of life (Sattari,
Noor, & Keshavarz, 2012).
Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) is considered the most promising wireless
access technology for vehicular communication (Bai, Stancil, & Krishnan, 2010). The DSRC standard
provides seven channels of 10MHz of bandwidth each. It consists of six Service Channels (SCHs) and
one Control Channel (CCH). The CCH is used for safety messages while SCHs are used for non-safety
services (Darus & Bakar, 2011). In dense network, a large number of vehicles can possibly broadcast
beacon messages resulting in the congestion of the CCH channel. These periodic messages lead to
broadcast storm/blind flooding problem in VANETs. It is very important to keep the CCH channel
free from congestion in order to ensure timely and reliable delivery of event-driven safety messages
(Vyas & Dandekar, 2014). Several congestion control approaches have been presented to operate
within vehicular ad hoc networks. These algorithms are able solve congestion problems in VANET
with some tangible contributions. However, some drawbacks of these approaches include overhead
under high node density, dissemination delay, long time to converge to efficiency and the exchange of
message priorities leading to congestion. This study presents a review of existing congestion control
schemes for VANETs with the aim of discussing the contributions and drawbacks of the algorithms.

VANET COMMUNICATION OVERVIEW

VANET mostly provides wireless communication among vehicles (vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V)) and
between vehicles and the equipment installed at roadside (vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I)). The main
components of the VANET architecture are the application unit (AU), on-board unit (OBU) and road-
side unit (RSU) (Olariu & Weigle, 2009). An OBU is a wave device usually mounted on-board a vehicle
used for exchanging information with RSUs or with other OBUs (Barskar & Chawla, 2015). The AU
is the device equipped within the vehicle that uses the applications provided by the provider using
the communication capabilities of the OBU (Saggi & Sandhu, 2014). The AU communicates with
the network solely via the OBU which takes responsibility for all mobility and networking functions
(Gupta & Patel, 2016). The RSU is a wave device usually fixed along the road side or in dedicated
locations such as at junctions or near parking spaces. The main functions and procedures associated
with the RSU are extending the communication range of the ad hoc network by re-distributing the
information to other OBUs and by sending the information to other RSUs in order to forward it to
other OBUs (Gupta & Patel, 2016).
VANET communication makes use of a number of applications. According to Biswas (2012), these
applications can be categorised into three: road-safety, traffic assistance and commercial applications.
Road-safety applications assist a driver to have a better perspective about the surroundings of a vehicle
in order to avoid potential dangers. These applications play an important role of avoiding accidents
and where the accidents are unavoidable minimize its impact. An example of safety application is
an early warning system. In such type systems, a driver can be alerted about the road situation, for
example, there is an accident on the road ahead, thus given enough time to the driver so that he can
apply brakes well in time before hitting the accidental car ahead (Laouiti, Qayyum, & Saad, 2014).
Traffic assistance applications assist drivers to enable efficient road and highway usage. Likewise,
there can be cooperative platooning of vehicles or adaptive platoon management for a highway,

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fleet management applications, highway merge assistance, highway access control applications, and
electronic toll collection for providing an intelligent traffic flow on roads. Also, different electronic
surveillance systems can be developed and deployed as part of the law enforcement on roads (Biswas,
2012). The commercial applications are VANET services that are provided to the user for revenue.
Potential applications include various download operations including maps, multimedia contents,
and software updates. Instant messaging between vehicles may assist drivers on their driving safety
and comfort. Commercial applications may also involve other parties than just vehicles and drivers.
For example, there could be event specific commercial advertisements of the nearest shopping mall,
a nearby restaurant, or any other point of interest to the vehicles on a particular road (Biswas, 2012).

VEHICULAR COMMUNICATION STANDARDS

Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) is considered the most promising wireless standard
that can be used to connect infrastructures (like roadside units) to vehicle (I2V) and vehicle-to-vehicle
(V2V) (Morgan, 2010). In December 2003, The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) - an
independent US government agency responsible for licensing and regulations of frequency for the
US and North America, adopted a 75 MHz spectrum from 5.850 to 5.925 GHz band known as the
Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) for the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS).
This frequency band is divided into six service channels (SCH) and one control channel (CCH) with
equal bandwidth of 10MHz each (Kaushik, 2013) as shown in Figure 1. The CCH is dedicated to
safety applications (exchange of security messages) and control messages, and SCHs are used to data
dissemination, which can transmit different types of service data (Biswas, 2012).
Following the allocation of the 5.9 GHz frequency band, a decision was made to develop a new
standard based on the IEEE 802.11a wireless Local Area Network (LAN) protocol (Hartenstein &
Laberteaux, 2010). The resulting standard IEEE 802.11p, consisting of a Physical layer (PHY) and a
Medium Access Control (MAC) layer, forms the basis of Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments
(WAVE) protocol stack. DSRC standards development has resulted in the IEEE 802.11p and IEEE
1609.x standards (Morgan, 2010).
The IEEE standard 802.11p and the protocol stack 1609.x together define the foundation for the
wireless communications among different entities (OBUs and RSUs) of VANETs. WAVE provides
security applications (1609.2), networking services (1609.3), and multichannel operations (1609.4),
while DSRC characterizes the IEEE 802.11p PHY-layer that has been modified from IEEE 802.11a by
incorporating the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). Nevertheless, both DSRC
and WAVE are used interchangeably in the context of vehicular communications (Biswas, 2012).
The relevant protocols and standards with respect to the layers of the ISO/OSI reference model
are described by the DSRC/WAVE protocol stack. The layers of the protocol stack are physical, MAC,
network, transport and application layers as shown in Figure 2. The protocols for the physical layer have
to consider multipath fading and Doppler frequency shifts caused by the movements of the nodes. The
MAC layer has to provide a reliable, fair and efficient channel access. MAC protocols should consider

Figure 1. DSRC 5.9 GHz band spectrum (Biswas, 2012)

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Figure 2. 1609.x and IEEE 802.11p DSRC layers for a WAVE-based VANET (Biswas, 2012)

the different kinds of applications for which the transmission will occur. For instance, messages related
to safety applications must be sent quickly and with very low failure rates. In the network layer, the
routing protocol has to implement strategies that provide a reliable communication and do not disrupt
the communication. The transport protocols for VANETs are designed for applications that require
unicast routing. However, many envisioned VANET applications require multicast communication,
which requires new approaches not based on traditional transport protocols. In the application layer,
protocols should minimize the end-to-end communication delay, which is important when providing
emergency information and in delay sensitive applications (Biswas, 2012).

CHANNEL CONGESTION CONTROL IN VANETS

In a dense vehicular network, the control channel (CCH) can easily be congested due to a large number
of broadcasts of beacon messages. Some congestion control algorithms have been proposed in the
past to mitigate this kind of situation. Their categorizations are discussed next.
Bouassida et al. (2008) categorized congestion control in wireless networks into end-to-end
and hop-by-hop. End-to-end control aims to ensure that there is a flow between the sender and the
receiver and there is no worry about the internal relay nodes. Since the internal relays are neglected,
interference, collisions and transmission issues are also neglected. This type of control is not suitable
for wireless ad hoc networks (Yi & Shakkottai, 2007). The hop-by-hop control method considers the
capacities of the internal links. This method lacks the scalability whenever the number of transmissions
increases. Considering the small size of transmissions in VANET due to the dynamic environment and
limitations of the nodes in terms of storage and capacities of computations, the hop-by-hop approach
is admitted to be more suitable for VANET.
According to Sepulcre et al. (2011), congestion control techniques can be classified according to 3
criteria. The first considers the information base from which the congestion control approaches derive
their decision in adjusting the transmission parameters. The two types under this category are reactive
and proactive congestion control. The reactive congestion control uses first-order information about
the status of the channel congestion to decide whether and how actions should be taken. Actions are
taken only after detecting a congested situation. Based on control theory, reactive congestion control
can be referred to as a feedback control mechanism. The proactive congestion control uses model
that try to estimate the transmission parameter based on information such as number of nodes in the
vicinity and data generation patterns. This approach avoids a congested channel condition while still
providing the desired application-level performance. A system model to estimate the channel load
under a given set of transmission parameters is employed. It makes use of optimization algorithms
in order to determine the maximum transmit power and/or rate setting to adhere to a maximum
congestion limit. Based on control theory, proactive congestion control approach is referred to
feedforward control mechanism.
The second criterion of categorizing congestion control approach considers the type of information
used to feed the control system. These can either be locally available or distributed information.

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The third criterion classifies congestion control approaches with reference to the means of
controlling the congestion i.e. transmission parameter adjustment. The parameters are transmission
power, generation rate and carrier sense threshold.
Some existing congestion control schemes in VANETs are thus discussed below under one or
more of utility function, fairness criterion, priority-based scheduling and/or threshold observation.

Utility Function
A utility-based congestion control approach is proposed by Wischhof et al. (2005) for non-safety
applications. In the proposed algorithm, Utility-based packet forwarding and congestion control
(UBPFCC) uses a utility function encoded in the packet header for estimating the utility of transmitting
an individual data packet at each node. Based on the estimated utility of its data packets for the
network, each node adapts its data rate to the local situation. In case of congestion, packets with a
low utility for the network are dropped. Network simulations demonstrate that UBPFCC avoids the
starvation of individual nodes and significantly increases the efficiency of information dissemination
(Wischhof, Ebner, & Rohling, 2005). The main idea is to dynamically assign the bandwidth according
to the utility value of the message to be transmitted at each device. This approach needs the road to
be segmented into sections for calculating the message utility metric, it cannot, therefore, be directly
used in context of safety applications (Zang et al., 2007).
Egea-Lopez et al. (2014) proposed Fair Adaptive Beaconing Rate for Intervehicular
Communications (FABRIC), a decentralized and proactive rate allocation algorithm with theoretical
and empirical convergence properties, which requires a reduced signaling overhead between vehicles.
The authors observed that existing rate control techniques proposed to date do not ensure correct
convergence to a fair configuration and have no theoretical support for global convergence. They
approach the problem of controlling the beaconing rate on each vehicle by modeling it as a Network
Utility Maximization (NUM) problem. The model of the NUM rate allocation problem is formally
defined and the fairness concept in beaconing rate allocation to vehicles is applied. The algorithm
provides a mathematical framework to develop decentralized and simple algorithms with proved
convergence guarantees to a fair allocation solution (Egea-Lopez & Pavon-Mariño, 2014).

Fairness Criterion
Torrent-Moreno et al. (2005) proposed Fair Power Adjustment for Vehicular environments. The
authors consider a fairness problem that arises in situations in which vehicles send periodic beacon
messages to inform other vehicles in the surrounding of their current state (velocity, direction etc.) in
order to improve safety conditions. The authors presented the fairness problem and formally defined
it in terms of a max-min optimization problem with an extra condition on per-node maximality. A
large number of studies have tried to optimize the channel throughput or capacity by adjusting the
transmission power, but no study addressed the described specific situation. The authors propose
an approach to solve this problem based on power control, and provide an optimal algorithm, called
FPAV (Fair Power Adjustment for Vehicular environments). The work aims to limit the load sent to
the channel using strict fairness criterion among the nodes. Conceptually in FPAV, vehicles have to
adjust their transmission power using control techniques in such a way that bandwidth utilized by
periodic messaging does not exceed a predefined threshold known as MBL (maximum beaconing
load). The idea behind defining MBL is to reserve a chunk of bandwidth for event-driven message so
that communication of safety applications is not hindered by channel saturation. This work presents
a strategy to achieve a max-min fairness power assignment, assuming global knowledge, i.e., using
a centralized algorithm, which is clearly impractical in a vehicular environment (2006).
Torrent-Moreno et al. (2006) propose a fully distributed and localized algorithm called Distributed
Fair Power Adjustment for Vehicular networks (D-FPAV) for adaptive transmit power adjustment. In
their motivation, the authors observed that while previous work address the issue of power control
primarily for optimizing network capacity and/or connectivity, the optimization criterion for improving

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safety has to be built upon the concept of fairness. That is, a higher transmit power of a sender should
not be selected at the expense of preventing other vehicles to send/receive their required amount of
safety information. The work aims to use transmit power control in order to reduce packet collisions,
while taking into account the major design goal of vehicular ad hoc networks, i.e. increasing safety. It
is however, a continuation of the work of Torrent-Moreno et al. (2005). In the methodology, a node
continuously collects the information about the status (current position, velocity, direction, and so on)
of all the nodes within its carrier sensing range at maximum power. Based on this information, the
algorithm makes use of FPAV to compute the maximum common transmit power level for all nodes
such that the condition on the MBL is not violated. The node then broadcasts the computed common
power level to all nodes in its vicinity. In the meanwhile, node receives the same information from
the other nodes. After having received the power levels computed by the nodes in its vicinity, node
can compute the final transmit power level, which is set to the minimum among the value computed
by the node itself and the values received from nodes in the vicinity. The performance evaluation
show that D-FPAV achieves strict fairness in terms of channel busy time sensed by every node in the
highway and a prioritization of event-driven messages over beacons. D-FPAV is formally proven to
achieve max-min fairness. The implementation of the proposed approach requires tight synchronization
among the nodes and a “global knowledge” on the channel load, which are hard to get in current
WAVE system (Zang et al., 2007). Also, the overhead introduced by D-FPAV is significant, especially
under high node density when saving bandwidth is the most important (Mittag, Schmidt-Eisenlohr,
Killat, Härri, & Hartenstein, 2008).
Mittag et. al (2008) improve upon D-FPAV by proposing the Distributed Vehicle Density
Estimation algorithm and Segment-based Power Adjustment for Vehicular environments algorithm
(DVDE/SPAV). Here, instead of exchanging the vehicle status (e.g., position, direction, and velocity),
“lower” quality information is exchanged (i.e., the number of vehicles in each road segment). Using
such information, vehicles obtain only a rough estimate of traffic situation in their environment.
The SPAV algorithm uses the estimate to determine the desired transmit power by ensuring that no
vehicle in its carrier sense range will have a beacon load higher than a certain threshold. Compared
to D-FPAV, the overhead of DVDE/SPAV is much smaller. However, due to the lower accuracy of
“lower” quality information, some vehicles will experience beacon loads that are above the threshold
(Lu and Poellabauer, 2010). Also, improving on D-FPAV, Lu and Poellabauer (2010) introduce a
novel transmit power control protocol for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), Efficient transmit
power control (ETPC) which mainly aims to increase probability of packet reception at neighbouring
vehicles at possible maximum transmission range. The algorithm tries to establish a common transmit
power throughout a region. The basic idea is to prevent nodes located farther away from a congested
location from increasing their transmit power, since they might become new hidden terminals. In ETPC,
a vehicle detecting channel congestion calculates a maximum transmit power which is propagated
throughout the neighbourhood. Transmit power is increased if no lower value has been received for a
certain time. ETPC achieves better reception probability than the D-FPAV at slightly higher control
overhead (Bouk, Kim, Ahmed, & Kim, 2015). Kenney et al. (2011) define a linear message rate
congestion control algorithm, LIMERIC (linear message rate control algorithm), which is designed
for vehicular safety communication. The work aims to achieve fairness such that all the nodes can
converge to the same message rate. It uses linear feedback to adapt the message rate, and thus avoids
the limit cycle behaviour inherent in traditional binary control algorithms. Each user can adjust its
own rate linearly with respect to the full precision of the error in the total rate. Compared to a binary
control, which would use only the sign of the error, the linear control scheme has an advantage in
that it can converge to fair rates with no limit cycles and that such convergence can be analyzed using
tools from linear systems theory (Kenney, Bansal, & Rohrs, 2011). LIMERIC is shown to converge to
a single fixed point, that is, a unique rate for every vehicle, which is below the optimal proportional
fairness rate by design. In multi-hop scenarios, it converges to unfair configurations and below the
optimum (Egea-Lopez & Pavon-Mariño, 2014). Bansal et al. (2013) introduce a further extension of

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LIMERIC, called Error Model Based Adaptive Rate Control (EMBARC) which adapts a vehicle’s
transmission rate as a function of channel load and vehicular dynamics. The work integrates a Suspected
Tracking Error (STE) component with LIMERIC. The value of STE is the difference between where
a given host vehicle (HV) thinks it is and where it estimates that remote vehicles (RVs) think it is.
The LIMERIC component of EMBARC adaptively determines the message rate associated with the
vehicle’s fair contribution to the desired channel load. Meanwhile, the STE is computed periodically
to determine whether the next transmission time scheduled by the LIMERIC algorithm is sufficient
for the current dynamics of the vehicle. If not, the packet is rescheduled for an earlier transmission
that satisfies a desired STE limit. This way, EMBARC takes vehicle dynamics into consideration in
determining the message transmission, while making sure that the channel load is controlled (Bansal,
Lu, Kenney, & Poellabauer, 2013). Tielert et al. (2011) design methodology for congestion control
in vehicular safety communication (VSC) called PULSAR, uses an additive increase multiplicative
decrease (AIMD) iteration with binary feedback (congested or not) from one and two-hop neighbours.
The approach adapts the transmission rate based on a binary comparison between measured channel
load and a target threshold. In the binary decision, a node’s transmission rate is either decreased if
there is excess channel load or increased otherwise. Therefore, the transmission rate is adapted within
the min and max. The combination of both mechanisms ensures local and global fairness as well as
sufficient convergence time when vehicles are moving fast. PULSAR claims targeting max-min fairness
allocations however, it requires synchronized updates and piggybacking congestion information from
vehicles at a two hops (Egea-Lopez & Pavon-Mariño, 2014).

Priority-Based Scheduling
Zang et al. (2007) proposed a priority-based congestion control scheme for Vehicular Ad-Hoc
Networks (VANET). The authors studied the performance of Emergency Electronic Brake Light
with Forwarding (EEBL-F) application as an example of safety measures in congested situations.
They stated that if drivers approaching to an accident spot start to brake only after they see the rear
brake lights in front, then there will be a high probability of having the chain collisions. The work
focuses on the MAC layer, and present the congestion detection methods as well as two congestion
control approaches: congestion control via MAC queue manipulation and congestion control via
dynamic transmit power control. The congestion detection methods introduced are event-driven and
measurement-based detection. The event-driven detection method monitors the safety applications
and decides to start the congestion control whenever a high priority safety message is detected. With
Measurement based congestion detection, each device periodically senses the channel usage level, and
detects the congestion whenever the measured channel usage level exceeds the predefined threshold.
In congestion control via MAC queue manipulation, the main idea is to provide the safety message
absolute priority over other traffic via manipulating the MAC transmission queues of lower prioritized
traffics, or to dynamically reserve a fraction of bandwidth for the highest priority traffic with adaptive
QoS parameters. For congestion control via dynamic transmit power control, the original idea from
Torrent-Moreno et al. (2005) is used to control the transmit power of low priority messages and keep
the transmit power of the highest priority traffic unchanged. Therefore, this work adjust the transmit
power for all packet types and study the impacts of transmit power control on the congestion problem
in VANET. This algorithm requires places equipped with Road Site Units (RSUs). Moreover, they
focused only on the performance of the EEBL-F safety application. This congestion control algorithm
should be tested on other event-driven safety applications such as pre-crash sensing and lane change
warning (Sattari, Noor, & Keshavarz, 2012).
Bouassida et al. (2010) proposed a proactive congestion control approach, Dynamic Priority-
Based Scheduling (DPBS), which considered the drawbacks in hop-by-hop approaches. Utility-based
approaches, such as Wischhof et al. (2005), requires context exchange between neighbour nodes,
which generates a communication overhead (Bouassida & Shawky, 2010). Their application-layer
approach is based on the concept of dynamic priority-based scheduling and is designed to guarantee

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communication architecture within VANET which is reliable and safe. In this model, packets with
high priority are transmitted first and with no delay. Meanwhile, packets with medium or low priority
are rescheduled. The scheduling process of the messages is done based on priorities and is calculated
as a function of the utility of the related messages, the sender application and the neighbourhood
context. Dynamic priority assignment, messages scheduling and messages transmission are the
major steps in this approach. Whenever the corresponding channel is free, the message with the
highest priority will be sent, in the messages transmission process. Yet, the high priority packets
which are sent through control channel are pre-emptive as compared to those which are sent through
the service channel. Even if the corresponding channels are not busy, transmission of the packets
with lower priority will be stopped, so as to send packets with high priority with minimum delays.
Additionally, whenever a higher priority message (compared to first messages in its queues that it
will send) is received, it freezes the sending process. The result showed that the delay of event-driven
safety message in this approach is 50 ms in the worst scenario. This result is critical because pre-
crash sensing safety application message needs to be disseminated to adjacent nodes within 20 ms
(Sattari, Noor, & Keshavarz, 2012).
Le et al. (2011) considered three beacon congestion control algorithms: rate control (RC), power
control (PC), and joint power + rate control (PRC). Dense deployment scenario of VANET, where
vehicles generate a high load on the wireless channel, can cause adverse impacts on the delivery rate
of event-driven warning messages. Since event-driven messages carry time-critical information of
high importance and are transmitted when a critical situation is detected, they have higher priority than
beacon messages. Thus, it is meaningful to reduce the beacon load to retain a certain amount of the
available bandwidth for the event-driven warning messages. Each node executes the beacon congestion
control algorithm independently and uses the channel busy time (CBT) as a metric for the estimated
channel load. The beacon congestion control algorithms strive to retain the aggregated beacon load
below a given threshold and reserves the remaining bandwidth for the event-driven warning messages.
Each of these algorithms incorporates the following three aspects. Firstly, they observe the channel
conditions during the monitoring interval T. Secondly, they derive the estimated channel load from the
observed channel conditions. Thirdly, they adjust the transmit power and/or the beacon rate to be used
in the next monitoring interval. The authors noted that our three algorithms are suitable for different
application constraints. Rate control is adequate when all nodes use the same transmit power and it
is possible to adjust the beacon rate without violating the applications’ requirements. Power control
is appropriate when all nodes’ beacon rate is constant and the communication ranges corresponding
to the varying transmit power meet the applications’ requirements. Power + rate control is the most
flexible algorithm because it allows application designer to tradeoff between beacon rate and beacon
transmit power (Le, Baldessari, Salvador, Festag, & Zhang, 2011).
The work of Konur and Fisher (2011) used the model checking technique to investigate the
efficiency of the congestion control scheme proposed in Bouassida and Shawky (2010). This scheme
is based on a combined static and dynamic priority assignment schemes. The former scheme defines
a message priority as a function of its content and the source application type. In another hand,
the latter scheme uses some parameters regarding VANET context such as, surrounding vehicles
density, vehicle speed and message utility. Using these priorities, each message is transmitted over
an appropriate channel. To allow fast transmission of high priority messages, neighbouring vehicles
exchange information about the priority of the messages they sent. Thereby, transmission of low
priority messages is delayed to prevent congestion. However, in highly dense VANET such as in
traffic jam scenarios, the exchange of messages’ priority information may quickly lead to congestion
(Djahel Ghamri-Doudane, 2012). Djahel et al. (2012) introduced robust congestion detection and
control scheme to overcome the drawbacks of the existing previous. Most of the proposed solutions to
control the congestion in VANETs try to control the transmit power used for broadcasting the beacons
to prevent the congestion state or at least alleviate its impact on the performance. This technique may
cause, in some situations, an isolation of some vehicles when the network density decreases. This is

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due to the frequently changing topology of VANETs as the vehicles move very fast and change their
directions so often. The work aims to deal with the severe effect of collision among MAC frames
particularly in case of high vehicular density due to the consumption of large part of bandwidth by
periodic beacon broadcast. The author proposed three stages based solution in which they first assign
different priority levels to the emergency messages according to their contents and the number of
hops that they have travelled. Secondly, they apply a congestion detection mechanism to identify
any congestion state in VANETs. Lastly, a vehicle adjusts its transmit power as well as its beacon
transmission rate, according to the result of the previous step, to facilitate the dissemination of the
emergency messages. In this scheme, the transmit power or the beacon transmission frequency are
reduced only in case where congestion is confirmed. Thus, the performance of ITS related applications
running on a given vehicle is kept reasonably high since it is altered only for relatively short congestion
period. The algorithm ensures that the most critical and nearest dangers are advertised prior to the
remote and less damaging events (Djahel & Ghamri-Doudane, 2012).

Threshold Observation
Khorakhun et al. (2008) introduce a binary control scheme, a Power or Rate based congestion control,
which adjusts either the power of transmission or the rate of packet generation with relation to the
locally measured channel busy time. Depending on whether the local measurement is below or above a
predefined threshold, the transmission power or generation rate is either increased or decreased by one
step. In order to achieve a higher level of fairness, the authors stated that it is necessary to exchange
the local measurements among neighbouring vehicles, and allow an increase of the transmission power
or rate only if the currently used value is below the average power or rate configuration used by the
vehicle’s neighbours. Compared with proactive approaches, this reactive approach is not able to avoid
congestion on the wireless channel, and supports no prioritization of different classes of messages
(Sattari, Noor, & Keshavarz, 2012). Busche et al. (2010) introduce Self-Organized Update Rate
Control (SOURC), an extended version of the approach by Khorakhun et al. (2008), which includes
a two-hop information sharing mechanism for channel busy ratio (CBR) measurements as well as
two CBR thresholds. Each node calculates the maximum CBR received from its neighbours within
its communication range. Based on this information as well as the node’s own CBR measurement
and the average interval of the node’s neighbours, SOURC adapts the transmission interval. All
nodes detecting congestion at their own location increase their transmission intervals, while only
those with the highest transmission interval may decrease it, given that no two-hop neighbour has
reported congestion. All other nodes adjust their transmission intervals implicitly by adapting to the
neighbours average. SOURC results in more irregular oscillations in the observed CBR. It does not
contain a message rescheduling mechanism, whose lack of may lead to instabilities in the system.
Also, it is observed that it takes SOURC a very long time to converge to efficiency due to two factors.
First there is an inversely proportional relationship between transmission interval and CBR. Second,
SOURC couples transmission interval and adaptation interval. Thus, a long transmission interval
additional slows down the adaptation process, which contributes to the long convergence time. While
SOURC has the advantage that it can be executed asynchronously, it appears to have difficulties in
converging to efficiency and may result in an instability of the system due to the lack of a message
rescheduling mechanism. In addition, it does not fulfil the participation fairness principle, since
congestion information theoretically propagates indefinitely when nodes set their transmission interval
to the neighbour average (2014).
Baldessari et al. (2010) propose a novel mechanism for the combination of power and message
interval control in a single algorithm loop. The proposed approach, power control and packet rate
control (CPRC), focuses on controlling the network congestion caused by periodic data traffic. The
design aims to combines both power and packet rate control overcoming the limitations of power-only
and rate-only approaches. The solution consists of an improved rate control, an improved power control
and a combined power and rate control algorithm, all of which use channel busy time observations

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Volume 1 • Issue 2 • July-December 2017

to derive the number of neighbours in the surrounding area (optionally, also through an additional
exchange of local vehicle density estimations). Based on the number of neighbours and a predefined
channel busy time threshold, the authors then either derive a packet generation rate directly, or start
via a fixed rate of packet generation and derive the maximum power of transmission which will not
violate the threshold. In the latter case, the authors assume that the vehicles in the surrounding area
are distributed uniformly and, typical for a proactive approach, make use of a communication model
that maps carrier sense ranges to individual transmission power levels (Sattari, Noor, & Keshavarz,
2012). Another joint congestion control approach, Adaptive Inter-vehicle Communication Control
(AICC), was proposed by Huang et al. (2010), where the authors adaptively change both beacon
generation rate (in a proactive way) and transmission power (in a reactive way) with the goal of
reducing channel congestion, and consequently improving a vehicle’s ability to accurately track
the position of surrounding vehicles. Two slightly different control approaches are applied to the
tuning of beacon generation rate and transmission power. Beacon generation rate is tuned based on
a predicted tracking error of own position. The prediction accounts for channel unreliability, that is,
packet losses, by including the observed fraction of successfully received beacons sent by surrounding
vehicles. Additionally, transmission power control is applied based on the observed channel status,
more specifically, based on the channel busy time. Note that both beacon generation rate and
transmission power use information locally available at the vehicles (that is direct observations) to
control transmission parameters. As a consequence, this mechanism bears the same fundamental
issue observed for Khorakhun et al. (2008): without knowing the channel congestion status of the
surrounding nodes, the transmission power adaptation mechanism cannot know why the channel
is no longer congested and which vehicle should reduce or increase its power value first (Sepulcre,
Gozalvez, Harri, & Hartenstein, 2010).

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS

In this paper, we discussed the merits and demerits of some existing congestion control algorithms in
VANET. The intent of the various works was to achieve efficient dissemination of messages, achieve
max-min fairness allocation, minimize delay in delivering safety messages, reduce communication
overhead and produce higher reception probability. We conclude that most of these algorithms solve
congestion problems in VANET based on MAC queue manipulation, priority-based scheduling or
communication parameter adjustment approaches. The communication parameters are adjusted based
on message priorities and utilities, channel busy rate/time, binary comparison local measurements
(e.g. channel load) and target threshold or error feedback. However, the drawbacks of the approaches
include overhead under high node density, dissemination delay, long time to converge to efficiency
and the exchange of message priorities leading to congestion. In future work, we will propose a hybrid
algorithm for congestion control in VANET based on a combination of MAC queue manipulation,
priority-based scheduling and communication parameter adjustments to achieve a trade-off between the
advantages and disadvantages of the individual approaches. We also plan to carry out the performance
evaluation of the proposed congestion control algorithm using network simulator such as NS-2.

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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS

Application unit (AU): An application, provided by the provider, which communicates with the
network solely via the OBU.
Periodic messages (Beacons): A periodically transmitted messages that provide very rich information
about the vehicular environment.
Event-driven messages: Messages generated when an abnormal condition or an imminent danger
is detected.
Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC): A wireless standard that can be used to connect
vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) or vehicles-to-infrastructures in a VANET.
Intelligent Transport System (ITS): An integration of telecommunication and information
technologies to improve the safety and efficiency of transportation systems.
On-board unit (OBU): A wave device usually mounted on-board a vehicle for exchange of information
with RSUs or with other OBUs.
Road-side unit (RSU): The RSU is a wave device usually fixed along the road side used to extending
the communication range of the ad hoc network.
Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication: A communication that can exist between vehicles.
Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication: A communication that can exist between vehicle
and road side infrastructures.

Samuel Ibukun Olotu is a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Technology, Akure,
Nigeria. He obtained a BTech degree in Computer Engineering from Ladoke Akintola University of Technology,
Ogbomoso, Nigeria and a MTech in Computer Science from Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria.
Currently, he is a PhD student at the Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Technology, Akure,
Nigeria.

Bolanle Ojokoh has B.Sc, M.Tech and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science. She is a Lecturer in the Federal University
of Technology, Akure, Nigeria. She teaches Computer Science courses like Communications and Networks, Systems
Analysis and Design and Compiler Construction. Her current research interests include Metadata Extraction,
Recommendation Systems, Opinion Mining and Gender issues in ICT. She has published papers in learned
journals and academic conferences such as Journal of Information Science, Information Sciences, International
Journal of Learning, International Journal of Digital Library Systems and Journal of Web Engineering. She was in
Peking University, China for Postgraduate and Postdoctoral research. She is a reviewer for a number of journals.
She has been involved in several important research projects.

Olumide Sunday Adewale is a Professor of Computer Science. His research interests include Data Mining,
Computer Networking and Data Communications. He is a member of Association of Computing Machinery (ACM),
and Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He was an ICTP, Italy Associate for several years after
which he won the First Bank Plc. of Nigeria Professorial Chair in Computer Science in 2005. He has supervised
several Masters and Ph.D theses in Computer Science.

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