Congestion Control in V2V Safety Communication: Problem, Analysis, Approaches

Abstract

The emergence of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is expected to be an important step toward achieving safety and efficiency in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). One important requirement of safety applications is that vehicles are able to communicate with neighboring vehicles, with very low latency and packet loss. The high mobility, unreliable channel quality and high message rates make this a challenging problem for VANETs. There have been significant research activities in recent years in the development of congestion control algorithms that ensure reliable delivery of safety messages in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of congestion control approaches for VANET. We identify the relevant parameters and performance metrics that can be used to evaluate these approaches and analyze each approach based a number of factors such as the type of traffic, whether it is proactive or reactive, and the mechanism for controlling congestion. We conclude this paper with some additional considerations for designing V2V communication protocols and interesting and open research problems and directions for future work.

Full text

electronics
Article
Congestion Control in V2V Safety Communication:
Problem, Analysis, Approaches
Xiaofeng Liu †,‡ and Arunita Jaekel *,‡
School of Computer Science, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON N9B 3P4, Canada; liu1ew@uwindsor.ca
*Correspondence: arunita@uwindsor.ca; Tel.: +1-519-253-3000 (ext. 2996)
† School of Computer Science, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON N9B 3P4, Canada.
‡ These authors contributed equally to this work.
Received: 26 January 2019; Accepted: 27 March 2019; Published: 13 May 2019


Abstract:
The emergence of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is expected to be an important
step toward achieving safety and efficiency in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). One important
requirement of safety applications is that vehicles are able to communicate with neighboring vehicles,
with very low latency and packet loss. The high mobility, unreliable channel quality and high
message rates make this a challenging problem for VANETs. There have been significant research
activities in recent years in the development of congestion control algorithms that ensure reliable
delivery of safety messages in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. In this paper, we present
a comprehensive survey of congestion control approaches for VANET. We identify the relevant
parameters and performance metrics that can be used to evaluate these approaches and analyze
each approach based a number of factors such as the type of traffic, whether it is proactive or
reactive, and the mechanism for controlling congestion. We conclude this paper with some additional
considerations for designing V2V communication protocols and interesting and open research
problems and directions for future work.
Keywords: congestion control; V2V; VANET
1. Introduction
Without doubt, vehicular safety is an important problem in modern society. Each year, nearly
1.25 million people die in road crashes, on average 3287 deaths a day [
1
]. Over the years, various
technologies have emerged in the vehicular traffic sector to help reduce accidents. Since 2001,
when Vehicle Ad Hoc Network (VANET) was first introduced in [
2
] as a term, it has been widely
perceived by government, car manufacturing industries, and academia as a promising concept for
future realization of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) thereby achieving safety and efficiency in
our nearly overcrowded motorways [
3
]. To date, a number of standards have been implemented to
accommodate the Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications for
safety-related applications. Short to medium range wireless communication known as Dedicated
Short Range Communication (DSRC) [
4
] has been proposed for such vehicular communication.
In the United States, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) allocated 75 MHz spectrum
for DSRC. Collectively the IEEE 1609 family, IEEE 802.11p and the Society of Automotive Engineers
(SAE) J2735 form the key parts of the currently proposed Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment
(WAVE) protocol stack [
5
], which provides the protocols from physical level to application level for
vehicular communication. Although several safety-related standards (e.g., channel spectrum, safety
message format) have been defined, there remain many aspects of DSRC performance requirements,
e.g., defining sending rate, transmit power control, adaptive message rate control that need to be
Electronics 2019,8, 540; doi:10.3390/electronics8050540 www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics

Electronics 2019,8, 540 2 of 24
investigated thoroughly. There are significant DSRC-related social and technical challenges that have
to be dealt with before large-scale deployment.
A key requirement of V2V communication is the reliable delivery of safety messages.
These messages are typically broadcast to neighboring vehicles using DSRC/WAVE technology,
based on CSMA/CA in the media access layer. Due to the multi-access wireless channel, many factors
can cause the delay or failure of the dissemination of safety messages. The limited channel bandwidth
available to transmit the safety messages means that the shared radio channels can become easily
congested as vehicle density increases. In [
6
], experiments have demonstrated that channel congestion
can occur even in relatively simple traffic scenarios. Channel congestion is a critical factor that leads to
delayed or failed messages delivery. With higher vehicle density, it is not clear if the channel capacity
will be sufficient to support the data load generated by both beacons and event-driven safety messages.
Therefore, the development of effective congestion control strategies for V2V communication is of
utmost importance and has been an area of intense research interest in recent years.
Congestion control techniques for traditional wired and wireless communication has been well
investigated in the literature [
7
–
9
]. For example, TCP [
10
] handles congestion with end-to-end control
by adjusting the data rate on the source node, when detecting a change in the acknowledgments
(ACKs) received from the destination node. In Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), researchers focus
on routing and backward compatibility in multi-hop networks [
11
]. However, the unique challenges
and requirements of VANET mean that these existing techniques are typically not suitable to be
applied directly for VANET communication. For example, since safety messages are broadcast to all
neighboring vehicles, collecting the ACKs from all the receiving vehicles becomes infeasible, as these
ACK messages will consume bandwidth and further exacerbate the channel congestion. The single-hop
based safety messages broadcasting in VANET also has completely different requirements compared
to the multi-hop communication in MANETs. Furthermore, congestion control in VANET becomes
even more challenging due to the high node mobility and channel fading constraints.
This paper will give a comprehensive overview of the requirements, performance metrics and
current approaches for designing a congestion/awareness control protocol for V2V communication.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we introduce the relevant background
information on V2V safety messages communication using DSRC/WAVE and the effects of higher
channel load on such communication. In Section 3we identify some of the relevant parameters and
performance metrics for evaluating congestion control algorithms in VANET. In Section 4, we analyze
and discuss the different congestion control protocols for VANET available in the literature and present
our conclusions along with some open research problems and directions for future work in Section 5.
2. Background
Vehicular safety means not only strengthening the body of the vehicle to withstand crashes,
but also improving a vehicle’s awareness of surrounding vehicles and vice versa. Currently available
camera-based safety techniques work within a limited distance, limited scope and require good
visibility. Inter-vehicle wireless communication can help to overcome many of these limitations.
The prompt delivery of safety messages, e.g., velocity, position, can be very helpful collision avoidance
and other emergency situations. Since the 1920s, radio communications between vehicles have been
used to improve safety [
12
]. Today, a wide variety of safety applications can be developed based on
ITS technologies. One popular method to classify these applications is Time-To-Collision (TTC) [
13
],
which measures the traffic conflict probability as the time required for two vehicles to collide if they
continue at their present speed and on the same path [
14
]. In [
15
], authors argue that one of the
congestion control principles should be deference to safety applications’ requirements in different
driving contexts. This means the applications will disseminate safety messages in different ways based
on the vehicle’s driving context.

Electronics 2019,8, 540 3 of 24
In V2V communication safety-related messages are disseminated by broadcasting and consist of
two main messages by two main types—(i) periodic messages and (ii) event-driven messages. The Basic
Safety Messages (BSMs) defined by SAE J2735 [
16
] in the U.S. and Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs)
specified by ETSI TC ITS [
17
] in Europe, also called as beacons, are transmitted periodically to announce
the vehicle status. The event-driven messages are transmitted at the detection of a traffic event or
road hazard, e.g., Decentralized Environmental Notification Message (DENM) developed by ETSI
TC ITS [
18
]. In this paper, we primarily focus on BSMs for periodic broadcasts. BSMs consist of the
following two parts:
•
Part I includes basic vehicle state which is mandatory in each BSM, e.g., time, position, motion,
vehicle size.
•
Part II includes vehicle safety extension, which is optional for V2V safety applications, e.g.,
event flags, path history.
The average size of a BSM is from 320 to 350 Bytes, but if security-related overheads are considered,
it could increase to around 800 Bytes. The default transmit rate is 10 times per second.
2.1. DSRC Spectrum for V2V Communication
FCC has allocated a 75 MHz spectrum in the 5.850–5.925 GHz (5.9 GHz band) divided into seven
10 MHz channels, with a 5 MHz guard band at the low end, for DSRC communication. In this spectrum,
Channel 172 is designated for safety [
19
] and vehicle safety messages are expected to be exchanged
on this channel. In [
4
], the authors propose that pairs of 10 MHz channels (channel 172 and 174) can
also be combined into a 20 MHZ channel, to achieve increased capacity with shorter transmitting time,
thus reducing the collision probability for the frame transmission. But a 20 MHz channel has been
reported to lead to higher inter-symbol interference (ISI) and inter-carrier interference (ICI) that can
significantly affect the successful reception of packets [
20
]. So far, the testing of DSRC and other related
research mainly focus on 10 MHz channels .
Based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and different modulation
techniques, DSRC provides 8 different data transfer rates (3, 4.5, 6, 9, 12, 18, 24, 27 Mbps). The higher
data rate, the higher is the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) threshold (dB) required for
packet reception. There has been only limited research work reported on how to optimally select the
data rate for safety communications. In [
21
], the authors proposed a 6 Mbps data rate after analyzing
the work in [
22
], which concluded the lowest probability of collision is with 24 Mbps data rate in the
channel under low overall channel load and without considering channel fading. A 6 Mbps data rate
has been widely adopted in many congestion control simulations in VANET [
4
,
11
,
15
,
23
], as well as in
some standardization activities [
24
]. Other data rates have also been considered, e.g., 3 Mbps is used
in [25–27] for its lowest SINR requirement.
Figure 1shows the current DSRC channel band and how BSM is transmitted on channel 172.
Each vehicle will run some safety applications, e.g., emergency electronic brake lights (EEBL), left turn
assist (LTA). These safety applications will need to disseminate the vehicle’s BSMs periodically and
acquire the other vehicles’ BSMs to complete their assigned tasks. All these BSMs are transmitted on
channel 172 plus some event-driven messages as well.

Electronics 2019,8, 540 4 of 24
1
Figure 1.
Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) channel band and Basic Safety Messages
(BSMs) transmission on channel 172.
2.2. Channel Congestion in DSRC
The 802.11p wireless protocol is currently the only protocol for low-latency V2V safety
communication in VANET. All the safety messages are transmitted with 802.11p, which uses carrier
sensing multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) to reduce collisions and provide fair
access to the channel. Due to the low latency requirements, the safety messages (both beacons
and event-driven messages) are always transmitted using one-hop broadcasting communications.
CSMA/CA is a contention-based random access protocol that can cause simultaneous transmissions,
i.e., packet collisions, which significantly lower communication reliability [
28
,
29
]. For broadcast
messages, re-transmission is usually not an option because receiving nodes do not send any
acknowledgement (ACK) to avoid ACK flooding. Furthermore, the important packet-collision
avoidance mechanisms like the request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) handshake are disabled in
802.11p MAC layer, resulting in hidden terminal problems.
The requirement to frequently broadcast BSMs can quickly lead to very high channel loads for
the single 10 MHz channel that has been allocated for safety messages. For example, let us consider
the following scenario: a 4-lane bidirectional highway with a vehicle density of 25 vehicle/km/lane,
BSM transmissions every 100ms from each vehicle, where each BSM is 500 Bytes. The amount of data
generated per second for mutual awareness could easily exceed the available data rate of 3 Mbps.
Similar calculation are also given in [
20
,
27
]. The work in [
14
] lists three important consequences of
high channel load for V2V communication:
•
successful packet receptions decrease and transmission delay increases with increasing message
generation rates;
•effective transmission ranges decrease under high channel load conditions;
•
communication range of a transmitter decreases under interference (lower SINR) due to hidden
stations or simultaneous sending.
The authors in [
14
] also identify the following reasons for packet loss under high channel load,
which need to be considered in the design of congestion control protocols:

Electronics 2019,8, 540 5 of 24
•transmission collision due to simultaneous sending;
•lower SINR caused by the interference from single/multiple hidden stations;
•packet dropped locally due to the failure of medium access;
•lower SINR caused by the nearby transmitting stations.
Both the MAC transmission delay and the number of packet collisions have been shown to
grow rapidly when the channel load increases over a threshold of the channel access capacity, e.g.,
above a channel busy ratio (CBR) of 40% [
14
]. The MAC transmission delay will cause safety messages
to arrive late, and a high number of packet collisions lead to a lower reception probability and hence
an effective radio range reduction. When this occurs, it is referred to as channel congestion. In order to
ensure reliable and timely delivery of safety messages, effective countermeasures need to be taken.
In the following sections, we well discuss and compare some of the important congestion control
strategies and their objectives for V2V communication.
3. Performance Metrics and Simulation Parameters
A number of different strategies for controlling congestion, in the allocated wireless channel for
V2V communication, have been proposed in recent years. However, there is a wide divergence in
terms of the objectives, performance criteria, simulation scenarios and other characteristics associated
with these approaches, as reported in the literature. In order to have a meaningful comparison of the
various approaches, we need to first identify the relevant metrics used to evaluate them, as well as
the specific scenarios and channel characteristics, for which each approach was evaluated. In this
section, we first consider the metrics that have been used to evaluate to performance of V2V congestion
control algorithms. We then discuss the some of the different scenarios, e.g., traffic patterns, channel
characteristics that affect the evaluation of these algorithms through simulations.
3.1. Performance Metrics
There are many different performance metrics for evaluating congestion control algorithms.
Some of the most commonly used ones for V2V communication are discussed below.
3.1.1. Channel Busy Ratio (CBR)
CBR (Channel Busy Ratio) or CBT (Channel Busy Time) is defined as ratio between the time
the channel is sensed as busy and the total observation time (e.g., 100 ms). It is a measure for the
channel load perceived by a vehicle, and depends on the number of vehicles in its transmission
range and their individual message generation rates. Many congestion control algorithms, such as
periodically updated load sensitive adaptive rate control (PULSAR) [
15
], random transmit power
control (RTPC) [
30
], distributed fair transmit power adjustment (D-FPAV) [
25
], distributed network
utility maximization (D-NUM) [
31
], packet-count based decentralized data-rate congestion control
algorithm (PDR-DCC) [
32
] use CBR/CBT as one of the metrics to analyze the communication
benefit of the algorithms. CBR has been shown to be a suitable metric to increase packet delivery
performance [
33
]. Simulations show that high message rates cannot be supported for all vehicles in
case of high vehicle densities or lager packets [
14
]. In [
34
], the authors investigate the relationships
between the CBR locally perceived by vehicles, i.e., the one-hop CBR, and the two-hops CBR. CBR can
also be an input to congestion control mechanism. CBR has been referred to in other documents as the
Channel Busy Function (CBF) [
11
] and the Channel Busy Percentage (CBP) in (V2V Safety Communication
Scalability based on the SAE J2945/1 Standard). For analytical research about CBR, paper [
35
]
gives a mathematical model in terms of CBR for channel load at a single position, load contribution
from a single transmitter and channel load distribution on road respectively. Paper [
36
] introduces
an analytical model based on a straightforward Markov reward chain to obtain transient measurements
of the idle time of the link between two VANET nodes.

Electronics 2019,8, 540 6 of 24
3.1.2. Packet Loss Rate (PLR)
Packet loss may be caused by different reasons, e.g., collisions, fading or control channel interval
(CCHI) expiry time. PLR measures the percentage of packets lost as a result of collisions and/or fading.
The percentage of dropped packets due to the CCHI expiry time is the ratio of dropped packets to the
total packets generated by the application layer [
37
]. There are other similar metrics like PLR used in
literature. Packet error rate is used in [
38
]. Packet collision rate, which is defined as the number of packet
collisions normalized in time and space, is used in [
30
]. Reception probability is used in [
21
,
25
]. The
inverse of PLR is packet delivery ratio (PDR), the analytical expression for PDR is given in [39].
3.1.3. Inter-Packet Delay (IPD)
The inter-packet delay (IPD) is the average delay between successive packets received from
surrounding vehicles. It is also referred to as packet inter-reception time (IRT) in [
40
], which is the time
between two sequential packet receptions for a particular sender-receiver pair, and this metric is used
to assess the temporal aspect of awareness in each transmission power control algorithm. A higher IRT
value means older information is being received from the neighboring vehicles.
Both PLR and IPD are important metrics for VANET, as they both give a measure of the level
of awareness of surrounding vehicles. As such, both metrics have been widely used in performance
evaluation of V2V communication protocols [
21
,
25
,
30
,
37
–
40
]. Although both PLR and IPD provide
information on vehicular awareness, they give different perspectives on awareness. PLR is used to
estimate what percentage of packets are reaching a vehicle, which gives a coarse-grained measure of
vehicular awareness. On the other hand, IPD can provide a more in-depth view, e.g., difference in
awareness for cases where the PLR may be the same. This is illustrated using the two scenarios in [
41
],
where 50% of the beacons transmitted by vehicle A with a 10Hz frequency in an interval of 10 s are
received at vehicle B, i.e., PLR = 50% in both cases.
•
Scenario 1: Alternate beacons are received correctly. In this case IPD = 200 ms, meaning
information for vehicle A is outdated for at most 200 ms;
•
Scenario 2: Beacons are received in batches—25 beacons are received in the first two seconds of
the interval, then no beacon is received for 5 s, and the remaining 25 beacons are received in the
last three seconds of the interval. In this case, there is a situation awareness blackout of at least
5 s. Considering that a vehicle position can change by over 100 m in 5 s at highway speeds, it is
clear that situation awareness is severely impaired in Scenario 2, resulting in possibly undetected
dangerous situations.
3.1.4. Additional Metrics
Besides the aforementioned metrics, some other metrics have also been used to evaluate the
performance of congestion control techniques. In [
27
] the probability of successful reception of beacon
message is used with respect to the distance to assess the algorithm’s effectiveness and the average
channel access time (CAT) for claiming fairness. Update delay is defined in [
30
] as the elapsed time
between two consecutive CAMs/BSMs successfully received from the same transmitter, which aims
to assess the awareness of vehicle from a communication perspective. In [
26
] a 95% Euclidean cut-off
error (in meters) is defined and a 95% Tracking Error in [
23
] is used to represent the tracking accuracy
of the communication policy, which possesses a statistical sense similar to a confidence interval (CI).
The information dissemination rate (IDR), i.e., the number of packets received successfully by a node’s
neighbours, is used in [
33
] as a metric for application performance. The authors conclude that CBR is
a suitable feedback metric for maximizing the number of IDR, with a recommended CBR target value
of 0.65.

Electronics 2019,8, 540 7 of 24
3.2. Simulation Parameters
Due to the high cost and safety factors, simulation is an effective and popular way to evaluate
congestion control approaches. In this section, we discuss some the important simulation tools and
parameters that can affect the simulation outcomes.
3.2.1. Traffic Scenarios
Channel congestion can happen both on the highway or in urban areas, when vehicle density
reaches a certain threshold. According to [
42
], a typical density for a 3-lane per direction on the highway
could be 25 vehicles/Km/lane, which will result in a 300 vehicles within a 1000 m communication
range. Authors in [
14
] claim that more challenging scenarios may be found on highways, because
a simple velocity-based rate adaptation would solve the problem in urban area. Under normal
low-traffic conditions, vehicles float in free flow. Due to perturbations at junctions or on-ramps,
the state changes to synchronized flow, where vehicles on all lanes in the same direction have nearly the
same speed. Due to further slight distortions, severe road traffic congestion occurs, also referred to
as wide moving jams. These transitions of traffic flow are most relevant for decentralized congestion
control, as the traffic density is high while at the same time the velocity is also considerably high.
Traffic perturbations may cause emergency braking and accidents, which should be mitigated with the
aid of inter-vehicle communication. Most of the congestion control approaches focus on the highway
scenarios. But still some researches consider the urban scenarios [
34
,
43
]. The traffic scenarios are either
deterministic, i.e., the vehicles are equally spaced with distance
d
m, or randomly positioned according
to a Poisson distribution of average density ρvehicles/m.
3.2.2. Channel Fading Model
The carrier signals are always degraded during transmission, which can limit both the carrier
sense range and transmission range, and also cause hidden terminal problem. Appropriate channel
fading models should be used to simulate the realistic environment, e.g., the deterministic Two-Ray
Ground model, the probabilistic Log-Normal Shadowing model, Rayleigh model and Nakagami
model. Among them, Nakagami model [
44
] is the most used one. Rayleigh model is a special case of
Nakagami model, where the Nakagami fading parameter
m=
1 and models a rough Non-Line-Of
-Sight scenario. For fading parameter
m>
1, Nakagami models an increased Line-Of-Sight scenario.
In [
45
], the authors give a empirical conclusion: the lower the
m
is, the longer is the transmission
distance used in the simulation. For example, when
m=
1, the model is suitable for the transmission
distances higher than 150 m. Since longer distance causes more fading, in [
27
] the authors refer to
Nakagami
m=
1 as severe fading conditions, to Nakagami
m=
3 as medium fading conditions, and to
Nakagami
m=
5 as low fading conditions. We note that the suitable configuration values for channel
fading can be highly dependent on different simulation parameters such as vehicle density, distance,
presence of obstacles etc. and different papers have used different values.
3.2.3. Simulation Tools
There are many network simulators that can be utilized to help researchers understand the
behavior and performance of the networks and their protocols. Here we list three of the most popular
open source network simulators currently being used: ns-2, ns-3, OMNet++.
1.
ns-2: Network Simulator-2 (ns-2) [
46
] is an open source, discrete event network simulator for
both wired and wireless networks. In ns-2, arbitrary network topologies can be defined that are
composed of routers, links and shared media [
47
]. The physical activities of the network are
processed and queued in the form of events, in a scheduled order. These events are then processed
as per the scheduled time, which increases along with the processing of events. However,
the simulation is not real time, it is considered virtual [
48
]. ns-2 was extended by [
49
] with:
(a) node mobility, (b) a realistic physical layer with a radio propagation model, (c) radio network

Electronics 2019,8, 540 8 of 24
interfaces, and (d) the IEEE 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol using the distributed
coordination function (DCF). After revised by [
50
], the resulting PHY is a full featured generic
module capable of supporting any single channel frame based communications. The key features
include cumulative signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) computation, preamble and
physical layer convergence procedure (PLCP) header processing and capture, and frame body
capture. The MAC now accurately models the basic IEEE 802.11 carrier sense multiple access
with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) mechanism, as required for credible simulation studies.
2.
ns-3: The ns-3 project [
51
] started from mid 2006 and is still under development. The latest
release is ns-3.29. It is treated as a replacement instead of upgrading of ns-2. It supports parallel
simulation and emulation using sockets. ns-3 provides a realistic environment and its source code
is well organized compared to ns-2 [
52
]. In ns-3, vehicle mobility and network communication
are integrated through events. User-created event handlers can send network messages or alter
vehicle mobility each time a network message is received and each time vehicle mobility is
updated by the model. The authors in [
53
] implemented a straight highway model in ns-3
that manages vehicle mobility, while allowing for various user customizations. The revised
ns-3 has two main classes: Highway and Vehicle. Vehicles are fully-functional ns-3 nodes that
contained additional information regarding their current acceleration, velocity, and position.
The Highway class uses Model and LaneChange objects attached to Vehicles to move vehicles
based on IDM (Intelligent Driver Model [
54
]) and MOBIL lane change model (Minimizing Overall
Braking Induced by Lane Changes [
55
]). In addition, Highway used ns-3 callbacks to enable
simulation developers to take control of Vehicles based on network messages, overriding, if need
be, the standard controls used in Highways. More improvements for ns-3 can be found in [56].
3.
OMNet++: Unlike ns-2 and ns-3, OMNet++ supports more than network simulation. It can
also be used for multiprocessors modelling, distributed hardware systems, etc. As a general
discrete event, component-based open architecture simulation framework, OMNet++ can combine
with SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility) [
57
], a traffic simulator and Veins (Vehicles In
Network Simulation) [
58
], which couples the network and traffic simulator to simulate the vehicle
communication. With Veins each simulation is performed by executing two simulators in parallel:
OMNeT++ (for network simulation) and SUMO (for road traffic simulation). Both simulators are
connected via a TCP socket. The protocol for this communication has been standardized as the
Traffic Control Interface (TraCI). This allows bidirectionally-coupled simulation of road traffic
and network traffic. Movement of vehicles in the road traffic simulator SUMO is reflected as
movement of nodes in an OMNeT++ simulation. Nodes can then interact with the running road
traffic simulation.
Paper [
59
] compared the performance of these simulators with the ad hoc on demand distance
vector (AODV) routing algorithm and concluded that ns-3 has the fastest performance in terms of
computation time. Both ns-2 and ns-3 fully utilize the CPU, while OMNet++ can provide more
flexible functions. All three simulators can satisfy most of the vehicle communication simulation
needs. They all can set up the common simulation parameters, e.g., noise floor, carrier sense threshold,
packet reception SINR, payload size, data rate, Tx rate and power. More details about the survey and
comparison of the simulators can be found in [60–62].
Although simulation-based VANET research has already produced important results, it has
to be considered that wireless simulators are not entirely accurate representations of the real life
situation, e.g., simplified propagation and interference models, inaccurate application data patterns [
38
].
A validation of simulation results using implementations on actual hardware (and vice versa) is
necessary in VANET research. There are several existing testbeds for studying various VANET based
protocols and applications. DRIVE [
63
] (DemonstRator for Intelligent Vehicular Environments) is
an experimental implementation featuring both advanced vehicular services and vehicular networking
(i.e., intra-vehicle, V2V, V2I communications). It provides a modular, re-configurable architecture
based on carPC, wireless sensors and rooftop antennae and uses wireless and mobile technologies, e.g.,

Electronics 2019,8, 540 9 of 24
WiFi, UMTS and Bluetooth. In [
38
], the authors discussed how a wireless testbed could be suitable
for VANET research by using only software adjustments, e.g., an approximation of the IEEE 802.11p
standard using IEEE 802.11a hardware, the emulation of mobility based on link impairment and
the use of low transmit power together with manual topology configuration. With these techniques,
IBBT w-iLab.t can support high vehicle density, multi-hop and emulation of mobility in a three-floor
building with some extensive facilities. In [
64
], SD-VANET (Software Defined Architecture for VANET)
is proposed to solve the high complexity in terms of the control and management of the network
infrastructure due to the coexistence of multiple different access technologies (e.g., already deployed
Wi-Fi networks, DSRC and cellular network). The authors use software defined networking to enhance
VANET with Wi-Fi access capability as both roadside units and vehicles. Additionally, a Wireless
Access Management (WAM) protocol is proposed to provide wireless host management and basic flow
admission with respect to the available bandwidth to validate the capability of the offered architecture.
MDX VANET [
65
] is a prototype VANET network built on the Middlesex University Hendon Campus,
London. It is used to investigate better propagation models, road-critical safety applications as
well as algorithms for traffic management. Some researchers use testbeds to measure the beaconing
performance for congestion control. In [
41
], the authors use two IEEE 802.11p compliant devices,
namely the LinkBird-MX v3 units produced by NEC, to measure two important metrics for congestion
control: beacon (packet) delivery rate (PDR), and the packet inter-reception (PIR) time. Authors
in [
66
] implemented the congestion control (CC) protocol defined in (SAE) J2945/1 standard [
67
]
using a congestion generation testbed of Remote Vehicles (RVs). The test uses a DSRC-enabled Host
Vehicle (HV) to wirelessly transmit BSMs, a Ground Truth Equipment (GTE) mounted on the HV to
accurately capture its position and a DSRC sniffer to remotely capture the BSMs received over-the-air
(OTA). Furthermore, The authors used a Congestion Generation Tool (CGT) that can emulate up to 160
Remote Vehicles (RVs) in the setup (which could be expanded) and up to 80% Channel Busy Percentage
(CBP) (i.e., a measure of channel occupancy) by transmitting a mix of BSM and WSM (WAVE Short
Message) packets. For congestion control research with simulators, different comprehensive scenarios
can be researched in a low-cost way, experiments can be repeatable and parameters (e.g., vehicle
movement patterns, vehicle density) can be easily controlled. But simulation can’t represent the
real-life performance. Several studies [
68
–
70
] have discussed this problem in detail. Regarding signal
propagation and interference, several aspects are often simplified in wireless network simulators.
Besides networking aspects, other elements such as traffic patterns and end-user models can also be
incomplete in simulations. The advantages of experimental implementations (i.e., testbeds) over the
above-mentioned approaches are the gain of hands-on experience in close-to-real or real performance
and behavioral issues, as well as favoring intuition shape practice. The drawback of Field Operational
Tests (FOTs) is the practical limitations, e.g., difficulty of implementing repeatable experiments, high
cost, specific traffic model requirements. More valid evaluation methods still need to be developed.
4. Analysis and Approaches
Many approaches have been proposed to tackle the congestion problem in VANET, using a range
of different control mechanisms, parameters, metrics and problem definitions. In spite of this diversity
of approaches, some common topics are generally considered when implementing congestion control
techniques, e.g., the safety message type, transmission parameters, fairness. In this section, we will
discuss some topics that congestion control measures need to consider and give an overview of the
related the approaches. We will also give a comparison of the various approaches in terms of the
criteria discussed in this paper.
4.1. Beacons (BSMs/CAMs) vs. Event-driven Safety Messages
As discussed in Section 2, beacons are used to periodically broadcast vehicle status information,
while event-driven messages typically disseminate more urgent information. Therefore, ideally,
event-driven safety messages should be delivered with shorter delay and lower collision probability,

Electronics 2019,8, 540 10 of 24
over a larger area. So, a higher transmission power is more suitable for event-driven safety messages.
Beacons are normally more relevant to nearby vehicles, typically within a 150 m radius [
26
]. In [
25
],
the authors note that there must be a strategy to balance event-driven messages and beacons and
conclude that the amount of load resulting from beacons should be limited, to leave some available
bandwidth for event-driven messages. Since beacons are transmitted by every vehicle on the
road periodically, most congestion control approaches only consider the beacons as the messages
transmitting on the channel [
71
]. In [
72
] the authors propose a V2V communication protocol specially
for emergency warning dissemination, which is a common example of event-driven safety messages.
Obviously both periodic beacons and event-driven messages should be considered in congestion
control approaches. But due to the difference in priority and dissemination mode (one-hop or
multi-hop), it is difficult to integrate the dissemination for both messages in one algorithm.
4.2. Reactive vs. Proactive
Congestion control mechanisms can be categorized as proactive (or adaptive in [
14
]) (i.e.,
feed forward) or reactive (i.e., feedback). Proactive approaches try to prevent congestion before
it occurs; whereas reactive approaches try to handle congestion after it is detected. In [
20
], the authors
use traditional control theory to depict the congestion control mechanism, as shown in Figure 2.
The objective is usually determined based on the requirements of the safety application, e.g., a threshold
channel load value. The controller is open- or closed-loop depending on whether it accepts the feedback
from the result, which can be from the network or from another individual node. The controller will
adjust the transmission parameters based on the traffic situation or scenario and the objectives.
Figure 2. Congestion control mechanism from a control theory point of view [20].
Proactive approaches usually set up a target value for a specific of channel load metric, e.g.,
CBR and adapt the transmission parameters to drive the metric toward the target value. Then the
algorithm can ensure the channel load will not exceed the target value. Some important proactive
approaches include D-FPAV [
27
], linear message rate control algorithm (LIMERIC) [
11
], error model
based adaptive rate control (EMBARC) [
23
], proactive ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing
(Pro-AODV) [
73
], additive increase and mutliplicative decrease based decentralized congestion control
(AIMD-Based DCC) [74], D-NUM [31] and RTPC [30].
An alternative approach is to react to congestion after it has actually occurred. Such a reactive
approach is used in PULSAR [15], Adaptive transmission control [75], AC3 [76], etc.
Reactive strategy reacts directly to the measured channel load. The transmit behavior of can
be pre-determined for any given channel load value. The function between channel load (e.g., CBR)
and transmission parameters (e.g., Tx rate) determines the behavior and convergence of the control
loop, when the number of nodes in range or their message rate changes. This freedom makes them
very flexible, but analytically difficult to handle and understand. Additionally, since these algorithms
react after congestion occurred, some BSMs may already get lost, which potentially can cause danger.

Electronics 2019,8, 540 11 of 24
Proactive strategy can ensure that the channel load does not exceed a given threshold (e.g., CBR target
value), but it needs to calculate the real-time information of the channel load and share with it’s
neighbours. If the shared information is too much and too frequent, the algorithm itself can contribute
to channel congestion.
4.3. Selection of Control Parameters
Based on the channel capacity analysis theory in [
77
], when vehicle density increases, each node
(i.e., vehicle) needs to either decrease the transmission rate (Tx rate) or reduce the transmission power
(Tx power), so that the limited channel load can be shared by all the nodes. So, transmission power and
rate are the two basic parameters that can be controlled to reduce channel congestion. Existing VANET
congestion control techniques either adjust the rate of BSM packet transmission, or the transmit power
or a combination of both to achieve acceptable levels of congestion.
4.3.1. Rate Control
The default Tx rate for BSMs/CAMs is 10 Hz, i.e., ten messages per second. At this rate,
the channel load will exceed channel capacity when the vehicle density is high, leading to packet loss
and delay. Rate control based approaches adapt the Tx rate to reduce the number of safety messages
transmitted by each node per unit time, if necessary.The safety applications based BSMs/CAMs
typically require a high probability information reception in a so called target range, i.e., 100 to
300 m [
78
]. In this context the inter-packet delay (IPD) is a common metric for application performance.
Safety applications usually will ask for a minimum and a maximum value of IPD within the target
range. Using rate control typically results in increased IPD, and may lead to unacceptable IPD values,
if congestion is high. A number of recent congestion control algorithms use rate control, including
PULSAR [
15
], which is based on the observation that the optimal choice of Tx rate depends on node
density and the optimal Tx range does not. A similar binary message rate control approach is given
in [
79
]. Other popular rate control approaches include LIMERIC [
11
], EMBARC [
23
] and a tracking
error based approach presented in [26].
4.3.2. Power Control
Tx power determines how far a message can be sensed and be received successfully, i.e., the carrier
sense (CS) range and the Tx range (normally 500 m with Tx power 10.21 dBm) respectively. Normally,
the carrier sense range is longer (e.g., double) than the Tx range, which may decrease further due
to channel fading and the interference from neighbours or hidden terminals. The goal of Tx power
control is to adapt the Tx range, based on some performance metrics. Reducing the transmit power
instead of transmission rate means that nearby vehicles will still see frequent BSMs. However, distant
vehicles will not see any packets at all from a vehicle that is far away. So, power control sacrifices
awareness of distant vehicles, but can maintain full awareness of nearby vehicles. Rate control, on the
other hand, reduces awareness for both near and far vehicles; but, all vehicles within the transmission
range will receive the BSMs. One of the most cited algorithms is D-FPAV [
25
], which uses a fully
distributed, asynchronous and localized approach. Other power control based algorithms include
SPAV [80], OSC [81], SBAPC[82], RTPC [83], NOPC [84] and AC3 [76], etc..
4.3.3. Hybrid Control
The ultimate objective for congestion control is to improve the awareness of the vehicles. Decreasing
the Tx power or rate may mitigate congestion, but lowers the quality of awareness. Conversely,
increasing the awareness by transmitting with maximum Tx power and rate increases congestion.
As indicated in [
85
], Tx power and rate are inversely correlated at constant target load on the wireless
channel, i.e., decreasing the Tx power allows an increase in the Tx rate and vice versa. The approaches
discussed so far can only set one single power/rate pair, which results in the transmission power/rate
trade-off dilemma [
30
], as shown in Figure 3. To fulfill the awareness range requirement (
OPrange
) by

Electronics 2019,8, 540 12 of 24
increasing the power, the rate has to be reduced, failing to achieve the required quality. On the other
hand, to fulfill the quality requirement (
OPquality
) by increasing the rate, the power has to be reduced,
failing to achieve the required awareness range. To overcome this limitation, some joint power/rate
congestion control approaches have been proposed.
These approaches [30,75,86,87]
, attempt to jointly
adjust rate and power to achieve the required level of awareness for all neighboring vehicles.
1
Figure 3. The trade-off dilemma by using constant transmit powers [30].
4.4. Overview of Different Congestion Control Approaches
In this section, we provide an overview of some of the leading congestion control algorithms
in VANET. in terms of the parameters discussed in the previous sections. Table 1lists the main
characteristics of the leading congestion control approaches available in the literature.
PULSAR: PULSAR [
15
] (Periodically Updated Load Sensitive Adaptive Rate control) is a reactive
approach, where each vehicle measures CBR at the end of a fixed time interval and compares the
measured value against the target value. When the measured value is higher than the target value,
i.e., congestion is observed, the vehicle will decrease its Tx rate accordingly. The PULSAR algorithm
first fixes the Tx range based on the required target range and then adapts the Tx rate, with respect to
CBR measurement. In PULSAR, the arrival of a new CBR measurement triggers a Tx rate adaption.
The interval between CBR measurements is called channel monitoring and decision interval (CMDI) and
is a fixed time for all nodes. When a new measurement arrives at the end of CMDI, PULSAR compares
the measured value against the target value (CBR = 0.6) and adapts the Tx rate using Additive Increase
Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD).
LIMERIC: LIMERIC [
11
] (Linear Message Rate Control algorithm) uses linear feedback to adapt
the message rate instead of the limit cycle behavior inherent in PULSAR. In LIMERIC vehicles in
a given region, i.e., a single collision domain, where all the nodes measure the same channel load,
sense and adapt their Tx rates to meet a specified CBR. LIMERIC is a distributed algorithm, executed
independently by each station in a neighborhood. If
rj(t)
is the message rate of the
j
th station at time
t
,
and
CBR(t)
is the CBR value measured at time
t
, then at each update interval LIMERIC adapts the
message rate according to:
rj(t+1) = (1−α)rj(t) + β(CBRtarget −CBR(t)) (1)

Electronics 2019,8, 540 13 of 24
In this equation,
α
and
β
are algorithm parameters that influence stability and adaptation speed.
The final Tx rate is highly dependent on the number of vehicles in the region.
AIMD: In [
74
], the authors use the TCP’s AIMD (Additive Increase and Multiplicative decrease)
congestion control strategy, described in [
88
]. The AIMD rule is applied on the transmit rate
r
.
Exceeding the channel load threshold
Cthresh
serves as decrease criterion. As long as the perceived
channel load is below the threshold, the transmit rate is increased by an increment
α
, otherwise
decreased with a factor
β
, where 0
<β<
1. After the update function is evaluated, the resulting new
transmit rate might be bounded by a predefined minimum and a maximum. If the CBR measurement
interval is large or subject to averaging or smoothing, the CBR update might be slower than the
transmit rate updates. Then a second decrease step is likely after a first decrease. This can be prevented
by resetting the measured CBR.
MD-DCC: In [
89
], the authors propose a decentralized combined message-rate and data-rate
congestion control (MD-DCC) scheme, which provides a fair and effective way of message-rate
and data-rate allocation among vehicles to avoid congestion and satisfy application requirements.
MD-DCC keeps the beacon frequency above the required minimum value by lowering the message-rate.
However, the traffic density may reach a point where minimum frequency value is reached and traffic
density still keeps increasing. At that point, MD-DCC increases the data-rate, resulting in more channel
capacity. Adjusting data-rate for more channel bandwidth is a novel idea, but if the vehicles transmit
message with different data-rates, the synchronization between the sender and receiver could be a
big problem. Also higher data-rate needs higher SNR which is more difficult when vehicle density is
getting higher.
EMBARC: EMBARC [
23
] (Error Model Based Adaptive Rate Control) extends the work of
LIMERIC with the capability to preemptively schedule messages based on the vehicle’s movement, i.e.,
a kind of suspected tracking error technique. This approach can provide extra transmit opportunities
for highly dynamic vehicles, hence reduce incidences of large tracking error.
TRC for CASS: Another rate control algorithm TRC for CASS (Transmission Rate Control for
Cooperative Active Safety System) considering tracking error is presented in [
26
], which focuses
on the dissemination of real-time tracking information of neighbouring vehicles while avoiding
network congestion and failure based on multiple scalar linear time-invariant (LTI) dynamical
systems. The authors first evaluate the decentralized information dissemination policies for tracking
multiple dynamical systems and use a Err-Coll-Dep [
90
] policy to get a better tracking performance,
then calculate the transmission probability for each vehicle every 50 ms based on the suspected tracking
error. Based on the transmission probability, the vehicle stochastically generates a packet with its latest
state information and places it on the MAC queue for transmission. This approach does not transmit
the safety message as a periodic beacon, but in a stochastic way based on tracking information instead
of CBR.
D-FPAV: Paper [
27
] proposes a method called D-FPAV (Distributed Fair transmit Power
Adjustment for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks) to control the load of beacons and another method EMDV
(Emergency Message Dissemination for Vehicular environments) for dissemination of event-driven
messages. D-FPAV achieves congestion control by setting the node transmission power based on the
prediction of application-layer traffic and the observed number of vehicles in the surrounding area.
As a proactive approach, D-FPAV uses a predefined Max Beaconing Load (MBL) and calculates the
network-wide optimal transmission power to keep the channel load under this value. By periodically
gathering the information about AL (Application-layer Load) for nodes within maximum carrier sense
range, a node first uses FPAV[
71
] to calculate the maximum Tx power for all the nodes within its
maximum carrier sense range, without violating the MBL condition. Then the nodes exchange this
power by broadcasting to the neighbours within the maximum carrier sense range. After getting the
same message from the nodes in its vicinity, each node computes the final power level, which is the
minimum value among the local maximum Tx power levels in its vicinity. In FPAV, all the nodes
increase their Tx power simultaneously, by the same amount, as long as the MBL condition is satisfied.

Electronics 2019,8, 540 14 of 24
The authors of D-FPAV also consider strategies to deal with event-driven messages, i.e., emergency
messages to effectively balance both low-priority traffic (beacons), and high-priority messages. D-FPAV
shows a clear prioritization of emergency over beacon messages and reception probability for both
message types are significantly higher at close distances, compared to no congestion control being
applied. In D-FPAV, a key problem is how to acquire the knowledge about the presence of other
nodes in the maximum carriers sense range. The carriers sense range is normally larger than the
transmission range. This means it is not possible to get this information of the vehicles located outside
the transmission range with one hop broadcasting. D-FPAV provides this information by piggybacking
the aggregated status information in only 1 out of 10 beacon messages, in order to reduce the overhead;
but, the overhead can still grow very high.
SPAV: Paper [
80
] proposes a distributed algorithm SPAV (Segment-based Power Adjustment for
Vehicular environments) that adjusts the Tx power, based on averaged position and communication
values for the neighbour information instead of using detailed neighbour information about each single
node in [
27
]. To get the minimum ‘required knowledge’ of positional information on neighboring
nodes that is necessary to guarantee a preconfigured maximum beaconing load in the network, the
authors propose a distributed vehicle density estimation (DVDE) strategy to provide an approximation
of the surrounding traffic situation to each vehicle. This approximation is then locally used by a
separate power control SPAV. SPAV is executed locally at each vehicle in order to compute a common
maximum transmission power for all vehicles in its environment. Therefore, SPAV derives a so called
catchment area, the maximum area in which vehicles are allowed to transmit beacons with a maximum
common power only affecting the center of the segment without violating segment’s MBL threshold,
for each segment in its environment partition using the merged vehicle density histogram provided
by DVDE.
RTPC: In [
83
], the authors propose to increase the Awareness Quality by randomly selecting the
TX power for each CAM transmission and vehicle. Each vehicle controls its current TX power by using
a certain probability distribution over a valid TX power interval. Using random TX power selection the
radio propagation conditions are shifted with each transmission as well as the collision and interference
areas. This mitigates the recurrence of collisions and interference, caused by the periodicity of CAM
transmissions in combination with slow relative speeds.The random power selection mechanism
provides statistical fairness as all vehicles use the same probability distribution and thus the same
average TX power. Hence, local fairness is maintained as well.
OSC: In [
81
], the authors present a new algorithm to handle congestion by altering the value of
transmission power. They propose a proactive approach, where transmit power of BSMs oscillate
between two levels. A specified number of low-power packets are transmitted followed by a single
high-power packet. This pattern is repeated until a change in network conditions (e.g., channel
congestion) is detected. If necessary, a rate control algorithm such as LIMERIC can be combined with
this method for further control.
SBAPC: SBAPC (Speed Based Adaptive Power Control) [
82
] presents a novel speed-based
approach for controlling transmission power of BSMs. IN SBAPC, each vehicle dynamically adjusts
the transmit power of BSM packets, depending on its current speed. The main idea for SBAPC is
that time to collision (TTC) with neighboring vehicles decreases as the speed of the vehicle increases.
Therefore, BSMs from vehicle at higher speeds should be received by more distant vehicles, and such
vehicles should use a higher transmit power. The results indicate a slight decrease in CBR compared to
OSC. The IPD is similar to OSC for vehicles within 150 m of the ego vehicle. Between 150 m–260 m
SBAPC has lower IPD compared to OSC; however, the IPD increases quickly beyond 260 m.
NOPC: NOPC (Non-cooperative beacon Power Control) [
84
] proposes a distributed congestion
control algorithm based on non-cooperative game theory to find the equilibrium point, i.e.,
Nash Equilibrium (NE). The authors consider the power control is a submodular game, hence has
a greatest and a least NE. In NOPC, each player, i.e., each vehicle, should pay higher price at higher
congestion for increasing its power in terms of twice differentiable pay-off function which is a function

Electronics 2019,8, 540 15 of 24
of CBR. Each vehicle measures its local CBR to update its BSM power based on gradient method and
does not require to exchange the algorithm related information with its neighbors. NOPC algorithm
also has a per vehicle parameter that every vehicle can adjust, without communicating it with other
vehicles to meet its application requirement. The simulation results show that NOPC is more efficient
in terms of bandwidth, it also has good stability and convergence to the unique NE with different
initial values of power for vehicles.
AC3: In [
76
], the authors propose Adaptive transmit power Cooperative Congestion Control
(AC3) to allow vehicles to select their transmit power autonomously with respect to their local
channel congestion. AC3 uses the notion of marginal contributions of vehicles towards congestion and
determines a fair power decrease for vehicles using a shapely value system model. This model requires
the vehicles with the highest marginal contributions, i.e., the highest level of transmit power used
by vehicles, to reduce the most transmit power and vice versa. Unlike [
84
], AC3 models cooperative
congestion control approach on the principles of cooperative game theory in [
91
], which allows us
to construct models of conflict and cooperation among players (i.e., vehicles) in order to maximize
individual payoffs.
Adaptive Transmission Control: In [
75
], the authors adjust the BSM Tx rate using AIMD (additive
increase multiplicative decrease), based on MAC blocking when congestion happens, e.g., the CBR
exceeds a defined threshold. The authors observe that any combination of Tx rate and Tx power results
in the same IDR vs CBR curve, which means CBR can be a suitable feedback for maximizing IDR.
They propose a methodology which first fixes Tx rate, based on vehicle tracking performance, and then
adapts Tx power based on CBR. One drawback is that the optimal choice of Tx power depends not
only on the current Tx rate, but also on vehicle density, which is hard to estimate correctly.
TPRC: In [
87
], the authors propose a TPRC (Transmit Power/Rate Control) strategy by first
analyzing the spatio-temporal characteristics of awareness and identifying the average or kth percentile
of IRT at a target distance
dt
, as a suitable choice to assess the safety benefit associated with a particular
Tx parameter (power or rate) setup. To find the optimal Tx parameter combinations, the authors first
set the Tx power to the optimal value for the current
dt
of the individual vehicle, then adapt the Tx
rate with TRC (Transmit Rate Control). When
dt
changes, TPC (Transmit Power Control) is applied.
The main advantage of the suggested joint optimization strategy is that it efficiently approximates the
identified optimal Tx parameter configurations for a given channel load target and
dt
, while reducing
complexity due to its independence of vehicle density.
RTPC + TRC: Considering awareness as in [
83
], the authors in [
30
] propose a new
awareness/congestion control strategy. The authors first use RTPC (Random Tx Power Control)
featuring spatial awareness control to reduce the channel load and then combine RTPC with transmit
rate control(TRC) by subsequently increasing the current Tx rate until the target load is reached.
This approach is similar with TPRC [
87
], but relies on randomized transmit power to provide
a heterogeneous awareness quality in space and to relax the strict transmission range to power
mapping. RTPC is to find an optimal Tx power distribution that in turn represents an optimal behavior
of the awareness quality in space instead of the optimal constant Tx power in TPRC.
CPRC: CPRC (Combined Power and Rate Control) [
86
] proposes a mechanism for the combination
of power and rate adjustment in a single algorithm loop, unlike the the two-phase joint power/rate
control approaches in [
30
,
87
,
92
]. CPRC’s policy is a cooperative behavior, where nodes that are not
directly involved in a potentially dangerous situation decrease their Tx power to allow nodes affected
by dangerous situations to increase their sending rate. It allows applications to send periodic messages
at higher rates, when required by contextual factors like speed and higher probability of collision,
without having the network load exceed the predefined reliability-based threshold.
4.5. Comparison of Different Approaches
Table 1provides a comparison of leading congestion control approaches discussed in this section,
in terms of the parameters discussed in the previous sections.

Electronics 2019,8, 540 16 of 24
Table 1. Classification of congestion control algorithms
Algorithm Rate/Power
Control
Proactive/
Reactive
Message
Type Metrics Used Channel
Fading Model Simulator
LIMERIC [11] Rate Proactive Beacon CBR Not mentioned ns-2
PULSAR [15] Rate Reactive Beacon CBR Reyleigh,
Nakagami ns-2
AIMD [74] Rate Proactive Beacon Reception rate,
IPD, CBR Not mentioned own
simulator
EMBARC [23] Rate Proactive Beacon Tracking error Not mentioned ns-2
TRC for CASS [26] Rate Proactive Beacon 95% cutoff error Rayleigh OPNET
D-FPAV [25] Power Proactive
Beacon,
Event
messages
Probability of
message
reception
Nakagami ns-2
SPAV [80] Power Proactive Beacon Beaconing load Nakagami,
Two Ray Gound,
ns-2
RTPC [83] Power Proactive Beacon
Packet collision
rate, CBR,
Update delay
Not mentioned ns-3
OSC [81] Power Proactive Beacon Beacon error
rate Not mentioned OMNet++,
Veins
SBAPC [82] Power Proactive Beacon Beacon error
rate, CBR, IPD Not mentioned OMNet++,
Veins
NOPC [84] Power Proactive Beacon CBR Nakagami OMNet++,
SUMO
AC3 [76] Power Reactive Beacon CBR Not mentioned OMNet++,
Veins
Adaptive
transmission
control [75]
Hybrid Reactive Beacon 95% cutoff error Rayleigh OPNET
TPRC [87] Hybrid Proactive Beacon IRT, CBR Power-law ns-2
RTPC+TRC [30] Hybrid Proactive Beacon
Packet collision
rate, CBR,
Update delay
Not mentioned ns-3
CPRC [86] Hybrid Proactive Beacon Channel Busy
Time Not mentioned ns-2.31
MD-DCC [89] Hybrid Proactive Beacon Channel Busy
Time Not mentioned ns-3, SUMO
Table 1shows that there is a fair balance between rate control and power control algorithms,
although there appears to be a growing consensus that a joint approach combining both will likely lead
to better results in the future. The vast majority of the current approaches focus mainly on periodic
beacons. There is a clear need to implement strategies that allow high priority event-driven messages
to be accommodated, even with high channel loads. Finally, in terms of performance evaluations,
a wide range of metrics have been used. However, some metrics such as CBR, IPD and packet loss
seem to be emerging as widely-used performance indicators. There is a need to identify a set of
standard metrics that can be used to evaluate and compare different approaches consistently.
5. Additional Design Considerations for V2V Congestion Control
5.1. Fairness
Fairness is important in vehicular networks to ensure that all vehicles in the network have similar
opportunities to communicate with nearby nodes [
20
]. It implies that no vehicle should be allocated
arbitrarily less resources than its neighbours. However, there is a trade-off between fairness and
efficiency [
93
]: more fairness usually results in a less efficient use of the shared resource. Unfortunately,
efficiency is critical for safety communication, so it is important to find a suitable balance between
fairness and efficiency. Although many congestion control approaches consider fairness as an important
objective, there is currently no universally used measure of fairness. This makes it difficult to evaluate
and compare different approaches for fairness. However, in this section we highlight different ways in
which some of the existing algorithms have considered fairness.

Electronics 2019,8, 540 17 of 24
Fairness includes both local fairness and global fairness. Local fairness means nodes near each
other share the same channel, i.e., they have similar congestion controls levels. In LIMERIC [
11
],
local fairness is implemented among immediate neighboring vehicles by assuming all the vehicles are
in a single collision domain. When the algorithm converges, all the vehicle will use the same Tx rate to
transmit. The a concept of “fair power control”, where all vehicles in a certain area must restrict their
beacons’ transmission power by the same ratio is introduced in [
71
]. A max-min principle is used to
achieve fairness, which aims to find a per-node maximal power assignment and the minimum of the
nodes’ transmit power levels is maximized as long as network load conditions are satisfied. However,
the max-min principle is very difficult to apply, due to the unbounded and probabilistic nature of
vehicular wireless communication. Authors in [
15
] deem that it is not necessary to require nearby
nodes to have the same Tx parameters.
For global fairness, all the vehicles contributing to congestion will be involved, which means all
the vehicles in the carries sense (CS) range need to exchange the channel state information. The CS
range is always larger than the Tx range, so one-hop is not sufficient to notify all the nodes within CS
range. In [
15
], the authors propose a two-hop piggybacking to share the channel state with the CS
range, hence to fulfill the global fairness principle. This maximizes the Tx rate of the nodes that are
throttled the most by congestion control, while not unnecessarily constraining other vehicles which do
not contribute to congestion. One drawback is that nodes measuring congestion would decrease their
Tx rates first, while others contributing to congestion might not yet be aware of doing so, and increase
their Tx rates even further. Effective ways to react to the same state of the system at the same time is
still a critical problem for global fairness.
5.2. Awareness Control
The vast majority of the approaches discussed so far aim to control congestion by appropriately
reducing the channel load. However, the ultimate objective of congestion control is to improve the
overall vehicle awareness, hence to achieve the safety of the vehicles. With this view, the authors in [
30
]
define awareness in the context of vehicular safety communication as follows:
Definition 1
(Awareness)
.
It is the ability of an application to know the status, e.g., position, speed, heading,
of neighboring vehicles. Awareness is qualified by its range, i.e., distance at which the application at most
becomes aware of vehicles, and its quality, i.e., accuracy/up-to-dateness of the status information.
Most of the papers we have discussed so far focus on how to control the channel load by adapting
the transmission parameters, so called congestion control protocols. The concept of awareness control
is explicitly proposed in [
20
], which aims at ensuring each vehicle’s capacity to detect as well as to
communicate with the relevant vehicles in their local neighborhood. Awareness control focuses more
on the satisfaction of its individual safety applications and the traffic information of relevant local
neighborhood. The issues have also been considered in some of the congestion control protocols.
Based on observation that congestion and awareness control protocols have been typically designed
and evaluated separately, the authors propose INTERN [
94
], which dynamically adapts the Tx power
and rate of beacons of each vehicle to satisfy its application requirements, while controlling the channel
load as the same time. The authors also claim that awareness control can achieve both local and global
fairness. But when different safety applications have different transmission requirements, it is very
difficult to guarantee that all vehicles in the neighbourhood will have similar transmission parameters.
Awareness control and congestion control can even be in conflict in some cases, e.g., when some
emergency event happens. The author of [
94
] proposed COMPASS (cross-layer coordination of
multiple vehicular protocols) in [
95
] which try to coordinate awareness control and congestion control
protocols. This approach has to get the transmission parameters firstly from the protocols and find
a intersection configuration set between awareness control and congestion control protocols which
might fail.

Electronics 2019,8, 540 18 of 24
To show how awareness considerations can influence the delivery of different safety messages in
VANET, we will examine several typical scenarios.
In Figure 4a we assume a low vehicle density on the road, where each vehicle is sending the
safety messages periodically in a radio range with some transmission power and rate. At this time,
the channel load is under a “safe” level, usually 40% of the theoretical maximum channel capacity[
14
],
which ensures that all the safety messages can be delivered to the other vehicles in the transmission
range. As the vehicle density increases, as shown in Figure 4b, the channel load will exceed the “safe”
level, which means MAC transmission delay and the number of packet collisions will grow rapidly.
The MAC transmission delay will cause safety messages to arrive late, and a high number of packet
collisions will lead to a lower reception probability and hence an effective radio range reduction.
To decrease the channel load, all the vehicles have to take some countermeasure, i.e., congestion
control, to reduce the number of safety message packets. Since there are no “special” events, fairness
in this scenario implies that every vehicle should have the same chance to share its current state, i.e.,
same Tx rate and power.
(a)Low Vehicle Density (b)High Vehicle Density
(c)Acceleration and Lane changing (d)Car crash
Figure 4. Driving Scenarios.
In Figure 4c we list two typical maneuvers: acceleration and lane changing. Vehicle A and
B are driving in the higher density context, so the maneuvers should be noticed instantly by their
neighbours to prevent an accident by enhancing the transmission power or rate. However, vehicle C
and D have different driving context, they can finish the maneuvers without any special adjustment
of the transmission parameters. In [
20
] the authors defined awareness control to differentiate it from
congestion control. Awareness control aims at ensuring each vehicle’s capacity to detect, and possibly
communicate with the relevant vehicles and infrastructure nodes present in their local neighborhood
as needed, through the dynamic adaptation of their transmission parameters. Since Vehicle A and
B’s safety applications require more channel resources than the nearby vehicles to maintain adequate
awareness, they may use a higher Tx power, compared to the surrounding vehicles, as shown in
Figure 4c. Finally, in Figure 4d a car crash is assumed. The safety message here is event-driven and
should be delivered to the other vehicles at the largest radio range at one time.
There are still many challenging issues in implementing appropriate awareness control strategies,
such as how to define the “relevant” vehicles for a particular safety application. For example,
in Figure 4c
, even if vehicles C and D are on the opposite lanes as A and B, their signals may still
contribute to the congestion of the area where vehicle A and B are located. The concept of awareness
control is an very important research problem for V2V safety communication. The goal is to find

Electronics 2019,8, 540 19 of 24
a suitable balance between a single vehicle’s safety application’s requirement, while maintaining low
channel load and fairness among vehicles.
6. Conclusions
V2V safety communication enhances transportation safety, by improving the awareness of the
vehicles on the road. The available 10 MHz channel cannot guarantee the delivery of safety messages
without latency and error when vehicle density increases. The dynamic topology of vehicular networks
makes the dissemination of safety messages even more difficult and error-prone. In this paper,
we reviewed the congestion problem in V2V communication and discussed the important approaches
for congestion control proposed in the literature. We analyzed how congestion occurs and discussed
the most commonly used metrics when evaluating the channel performance. We also identified
different simulation parameters that affect the evaluation of the algorithms. Finally, we classified and
compared the leading congestion control approaches in terms of different relevant criteria, such as
control mechanism, parameter being adjusted, and message type.
Congestion control in VANET is an important and challenging problem. Although,
some interesting and effective strategies have been reported in the literature, there are still many
challenges and open research problems for congestion control in V2V safety communication in the
future. A few directions for future research are given below.
•
Joint power/rate control: Existing hybrid approaches that combine Tx power and rate adaption
typically implement congestion control in two different phases, e.g., fix a Tx power first and
then adapt the Tx rate. A real time combined Tx power and rate control based on detailed safety
benefit calculations can lead to improved performance and is a promising direction for research.
•
Improved awareness control: As discussed in Section 5.2, awareness control focuses more on
the relevant vehicles and local vehicles’ information. We need to be able to accurately identify
“relevant” vehicles and acquire detailed local traffic information, e.g., awareness needs more
specific information about the vehicle’s position, speed. So far only a few papers have considered
the tracking error when implementing congestion control.
•
Relative fairness: Each vehicle may have a very different driving context. So absolute fairness
for both local or global fairness is not realistic. More specific relative fairness criteria are needed,
when adapting the transmission parameters. It is an important problem to develop suitable
metrics for evaluating fairness in different contexts and design approaches that maximize fairness.
•
Standardization: In this paper, we reviewed many different metrics and approaches for V2V
safety communication. It is not realistic to follow one unified process to deal with congestion
problem, however at least the metrics used in the approaches should be normalized. For example,
the widely used CBR metric has been referred to by a number of different names in different
papers. There is a need for adoption of a common terminology and method of calculation for the
performance metrics, to ensure consistent and fair evaluation of the various approaches.
Author Contributions:
X.L., A.J. designed the paper, X.L. collected the data, performed the analysis, and wrote
the paper under the supervision of A.J. A.J. supervised the research and provided guidance and key suggestions
in writing the paper.
Funding: This research was funded by NSERC DG, Grant# RGPIN-2015-05641.
Acknowledgments:
The work of A. Jaekel has been supported by a research grant from the Natural Sciences and
Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
Conflicts of Interest: The researcher claims no conflicts of interests.
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