Architecture for Decentralized Mitigation of Local Congestion in VANETs

As communication resources in VANETs are limited, they have to be used efficiently to achieve communication even under interference, especially in high load situations, where high packet loss is expected. Packet loss occurs on the channel or it occurs in the local queue due to a saturated channel. This article introduces a model that determines the network capacity and the influence of hidden stations. It presents a crosslayer framework for efficient channel usage motivated by this model. The framework comprises default mechanisms which efficiently avoid local congestion. We show how to integrate and combine advanced mechanisms at different layers. Thus, there are strong indications that the communication performance can be improved significantly in high load situations.