A congestion control scheme estimating global channel busy ratio in VANETs

In vehicular safety service, every vehicle broadcasts Basic Safety Message (BSM) periodically to inform neighbor vehicles of host vehicle information. However, this can cause network congestion in a region that is crowded with vehicles resulting in a reduction in the message delivery ratio and an increase in the end-to-end delay. Therefore, it could destabilize the vehicular safety service system. In this paper, in order to improve the congestion control and to consider the hidden node problem, we propose a congestion control scheme using entire network congestion level estimation combined with transmission power control, data rate control and time slot based transmission control algorithm. The performance of this scheme is evaluated using a Qualnet network simulator. The simulation result shows that our scheme mitigates network congestion in heavy traffic cases and enhances network capacity in light traffic cases, so that packet error rate is perfectly within 10% and entire network load level is maintained within 60~70%. Thus, it can be concluded that the proposed congestion control scheme has quite good performance.