Beacon Rate Optimization for Vehicular Safety Applications in Highway Scenarios

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication enables exchanging information between vehicles by broadcasting safety and beacon messages. Safety applications based on a so-called dedicated short-range communication, which are one of the main applications of V2V, require a very strict network performance for safety messages. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the beacon rate on the network performance of safety messages and develop an optimization problem to recommend optimal beacon rates based on a utility maximization framework. The message utility is constructed to account for the reliability requirements of safety messages and maintain the accuracy of neighborhood information collected by beacons. Specifically, we obtain the relationship between the optimal beacon rate and the system parameters. Our results show that the optimal beacon rates can meet the requirements of safety applications and improve the network performance up to 40%.