Performance Evaluation of Beacon Congestion Control Algorithms for VANETs

Beacon and event-driven warning messages are two important messages that are used by many Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications for improving road safety and traffic efficiency. Beacon messages are regularly broadcast by each vehicle to notify other vehicles of its presence and its status. Event-driven warning messages are emitted when a vehicle or the road infrastructure discerns a critical situation. When congestion occurs, it is necessary to reduce the beacon load to keep a certain amount of the available bandwidth for the event-driven messages because they carry time- critical information of high importance. This paper considers three beacon congestion control algorithms that control the beacon load below a certain threshold by adjusting the transmit rate and/or transmit power for the beacon messages. We perform a large set of simulations to evaluate these algorithms. Our simulation results reveal promising results for these algorithms.