Enhancing Emergency Messages Dissemination in Vehicular Networks Using Network Coding

Vehicular ad-hoc networks play an important role in providing safety on the road. Vehicles generate and exchange emergency and control messages to avoid dangerous situations. According to IEEE 1609.4 standard, all these messages share the same control channel interval even if the emergency messages are with a highest priority. Besides that, network’s characteristics, such as vehicle density and high mobility, would make the diffusion of emergency messages a challenging task. Especially with the absence of acknowledgements and retransmission. Network coding could be seen as a solution where a block of data packets could be sent on the same transmission process. Firstly, we analyze the messages’ dissemination, and we propose a thoroughly model for success probability according to the emergency messages’ generation probabilities. Further, we propose a new network coding access scheme. The emergency messages take the priority in the channel access and it could be retransmitted several times. Thus, the scheme deals with the emergency messages’ loss and latency. NS-3 simulations show that our model increases emergency messages’ reliability.