Vehicle Safety Communications (VSC) is advancing rapidly towards product development and field testing. While a number of possible solutions have been proposed, the question remains open as how such a system will address the issue of scalability in its actual deployment. This paper presents a design methodology for congestion control in VSC as well as the description and evaluation of a resulting rate adaption oriented protocol named PULSAR. We start with a list of design principles reflecting the state of the art that define why and how vehicles should behave while responding to channel congestion in order to ensure fairness and support the needs of safety applications. From these principles, we derive protocol building blocks required to fulfill the defined objectives. Then, the actual protocol is described and assessed in detail, including a discussion on the intricate features of channel load assessment, rate adaptation and information sharing. A comparison with other state-of-theart protocols shows that "details matter" with respect to the temporal and spatial dimensions of the protocol outcome.

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In Vehicle Safety Communications (VSC) based on IEEE 802.11p, vehicles establish a mutual awareness of their presence by periodically broadcasting status messages, aka beacons. If vehicle density is high and beaconing is not regulated, the channel can become congested, impairing reception performance and safety benefit. As a countermeasure, a number of congestion control approaches have been suggested, adapting transmit (Tx) power, beacon generation rate (Tx rate), or both. However, in general these approaches did not show what the optimal outcome for congestion control would be and how and why their solution would lead to the desired result. In this work, we analyze answers to the first question and provide a methodology for the second. We systematically derive a joint power/rate control strategy for VSC which optimizes reception performance for a targeted sender-receiver distance. We start by laying out why we consider average (or percentile of) packet Inter-Reception Time (IRT) at the targeted awareness distance to be a suitable metric for our purpose. Then, we analyze a wide range of Tx parameters to identify which combinations optimize reception in a homogeneous scenario. We show that for each sender-receiver distance, there is an optimal Tx power which, unlike the corresponding Tx rate, is independent of node density. In addition, we analyze the Pareto optimal Tx parameter combinations for two groups of vehicles with different target distances adapting at the same time. We show that the majority of these combinations use the same Tx power as identified in the homogeneous case. We conclude that a simple and efficient strategy to optimize reception performance is to select Tx power w.r.t. the targeted distance and to adapt Tx rate w.r.t. channel load.

Abstract-The characteristics of vehicular communication environments and their networking and application requirements have led to the development of unique networking protocols. They enable vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication based on the IEEE 802.11 technology, ad hoc principles, and wireless multihop techniques using geographical positions. These protocols, which are commonly referred to as Geocast, greatly support the vehicular communication and applications but necessitate a tailored security solution that provides the required security level with reasonable processing and protocol overhead, as well as reasonably priced onboard and road-side unit equipment. In this paper, we present the design of a security solution for Geocast, which is based on cryptographic protection, plausibility checks using secure neighbor discovery and mobility-related checks, trustworthy neighborhood assessment, and rate limitation. We analyze the achieved security level of the proposed scheme and assess its overhead and performance. Furthermore, we develop a software-based prototype implementation of a secure vehicular communication system. We find that the proposed security measures could result in a network performance bottleneck in realistic vehicular scenarios. Finally, we analyze the tradeoff between security overhead and protocol performance and determine the minimal processing overhead needed for acceptable performance.