Analysis of Multi-Hop Probabilistic Forwarding for Vehicular Safety Applications on Highways

Safety applications based on the dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) in vehicular networks have very strict performance requirements for safety messages (in terms of delay and packet delivery). However, there is a lack of systematic approach to achieve the performance requirements by leveraging the potential of multi-hop forwarding. This paper proposes a generic multi-hop probabilistic forwarding scheme that achieves these requirements for event-driven safety messages, is compatible with the 802.11 broadcasting protocol and inherits some of the best features of solutions proposed so far for vehicular safety applications. In addition, we develop a unified and comprehensive analytical model to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme taking into account the effect of hidden terminals, vehicle densities, and the spatial distribution of the multiple forwarders, in a one-dimensional highway scenario. Our numerical experiments confirm the accuracy of the model and demonstrate that the proposed protocol can improve the packet delivery performance by up to 209 percent, while maintaining the delay well below the required threshold. Finally, the utility of the analytical model is demonstrated via an optimal design for the coefficients of a forwarding probability function in the proposed scheme.