Crash Risk-Based Prioritization of Basic Safety Message in DSRC

Dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) is one of the key technologies enabling safety-critical applications for intelligent transportation system (ITS). Considering the significance of such safety-of-life applications, it is of utmost importance to guarantee reliable delivery of basic safety messages (BSMs). However, in accordance with a V2X network being inherently dynamic in key aspects such as vehicle density and velocity, the networking behavior of a DSRC system is usually highly complicated to analyze. In addition, the United States Federal Communications Commission (US FCC) recently proposed the so-called “5.9 GHz band innovation”, which includes a plan to reduce bandwidth for DSRC to 10 MHz at best from 75 MHz. Motivated from these challenges, the necessity of “lightening” load of a DSRC network has become essential to keep safety-related operations from performance deterioration. To this end, this paper proposes a protocol that prioritizes transmission of a BSM from a vehicle according to the level of accident risk of the vehicle. The proposed protocol uses the distance of a vehicle from a danger source as the metric to determine the priority for transmission. Our results show that this protocol effectively prioritizes the transmission opportunity for dangerous vehicles, and hence results in higher performance in terms of key metrics–i.e., average latency, packet delivery rate (PDR), and inter-reception time (IRT)