Enhancing VANET Performance by Joint

Adaptation of Transmission Power

and Contention Window Size
Danda B. Rawat, Member, IEEE, Dimitrie C. Popescu, Senior Member, IEEE,
Gongjun Yan, Member, IEEE, and Stephan Olariu, Senior Member, IEEE
AbstractIn this paper, we present a new scheme for dynamic adaptation of transmission power and contention window (CW) size to
enhance performance of information dissemination in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). The proposed scheme incorporates the
Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) mechanism of 802.11e and uses a joint approach to adapt transmission power at the
physical (PHY) layer and quality-of-service (QoS) parameters at the medium access control (MAC) layer. In our scheme, transmission
power is adapted based on the estimated local vehicle density to change the transmission range dynamically, while the CW size is
adapted according to the instantaneous collision rate to enable service differentiation. In the interest of promoting timely propagation of
information, VANET advisories are prioritized according to their urgency and the EDCA mechanismis employed for their dissemination.
The performance of the proposed joint adaptation scheme was evaluated using the ns-2 simulator with added EDCA support. Extensive
simulations have demonstrated that our scheme features significantly better throughput and lower average end-to-end delay compared
with a similar scheme with static parameters.
Index TermsVehicular networks, VANETs, broadcast, contention window adaptation, message differentiation, transmission power
adaptation, QoS, medium access control protocol, 802.11e EDCA, intelligent transportation system.

1 INTRODUCTION
W
E are witnessing an unmistakable convergence of
Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) andIntelligent
Transportation Systems (ITSs) that is poised to bring about a
revolutionary leap by making our roadways and streets safer
and the driving experience more enjoyable [1]. Working in
tandem with the fielded ITS infrastructure, VANET is
expected to enhance the awareness of the traveling public
by aggregating, propagating, and disseminating up-to-the-
minute information about existing or impending traffic-
related events. In support of their mission, VANET commu-
nications, employing a combination of Vehicle-to-Vehicle
(V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) wireless commu-
nication are expected to integrate the driving experience into
a ubiquitous and pervasive network that will enable novel
traffic monitoringandincident detectionparadigms [2], [3]. It
is worth noting that the vast majority of the traffic advisories
are of a general interest and, therefore, benefit from being
broadcast. For instance, when a traffic incident occurs, all the
vehicles on the road benefit from timely and accurate
information dissemination allowing the drivers to make
informed decisions. Thus, reliability and low delay are
extremely important factors in VANET safety applications.
It is widely known that, due to high-speed mobility, V2Vand
V2I communication links tend to be shortlived. Thus, it is
important to propagate traffic-related information toward a
certain region of interest instead of sending to a particular
vehicle; moreover, one of the best ways of propagatingtraffic-
related advisories toward a particular region is some form of
(controlled) broadcast transmission.
One strategy of increasing duration of communication
links in VANET is by increasing the transmission range in
sparse traffic conditions, where only a few vehicles may be
present on the road. However, increasing the transmission
range may generate high levels of disruptive interference
and high-network overhead in dense traffic conditions. It
follows that dynamic adaptation of transmission power in
response to changing traffic density is a critical requirement
in VANET. In addition, in order to propagate emergency
messages in a timely manner, VANET must support some
form of message differentiation, similar in spirit to service
differentiation for QoS in the contention-based channel
access mechanism EDCA of 802.11e [4]. To implement this
strategy, different priority levels can be assigned to various
traffic-related messages according to their urgency or delay
requirements. For example, messages related to an incident
on the roadway should be propagated to the target region
on time and in an accurate manner in order to avoid
congestion and potential secondary accidents.
1.1 Related Work
Because of the advantages it offers, the IEEE 802.11 wireless
standard is used by a host of protocols for information
1528 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS, VOL. 22, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2011
. D.B. Rawat and D.C. Popescu are with the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, Old Dominion University, 231 Kaufman Hall,
Norfolk, VA 23529. E-mail: {drawa001, dpopescu}@odu.edu.
. G. Yan is with the Department of Natural, Information, and Mathematical
Sciences, Indiana University, Kokomo, IN 46904-9003.
E-mail: gyan@iuk.edu.
. S. Olariu is with the Department of Computer Science, Old Dominion
University, Norfolk, VA 23529. E-mail: olariu@cs.odu.edu.
Manuscript received 11 May 2010; revised 30 Sept. 2010; accepted 5 Oct.
2010; published online 18 Jan. 2011.
Recommended for acceptance by A. Nayak.
For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send e-mail to:
tpds@computer.org, and reference IEEECS Log Number TPDS-2010-05-0290.
Digital Object Identifier no. 10.1109/TPDS.2011.41.
1045-9219/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE Published by the IEEE Computer Society
forwarding and dissemination in VANET. In 2004, the IEEE
Task Group p (TGp) started to develop IEEE 802.11p [5] by
amending the IEEE 802.11 standard to include vehicular
communication operating at speeds up to 200 km/h and
with a communication range as large as 1,000 m. The IEEE
802.11p standard was designed to operate at 5.9 GHz and
data rates up to 27 Mb/s with the stated goal of supporting
V2I communication or V2V communication in the context of
the FCC-mandated Dedicated Short Range Communication
(DSRC) [6].
To set the stage for the proposed scheme, it is appropriate
to note that the use of the EDCAmechanismof 802.11e in the
context of VANET was discussed by Suthaputchakun and
Ganz [7], where a priority-based scheme for V2V commu-
nications was proposed. However, while the authors of [7]
proposed incorporating of the EDCA mechanism of 802.11e
in VANET, they did not address the problem of adapting
QoS parameters or that of adapting transmission power
according to local traffic conditions.
To the best of our knowledge the problem of adapting
transmission power in VANET based on vehicle density
was first discussed by Artimy [8], while the problem of
dynamically adapting the CW size for reliable broadcast in
VANET was discussed by Balon and Guo [9]. However, the
authors of [9] only considered the channel access time
according to the urgency of messages and their delay
requirements, without considering the adaptation of trans-
mission power, or the prioritization of messages according
to their urgency, or the adaptation of the CW size for
transmission opportunity, which can enhance system
throughput while reducing end-to-end message delay
[10], [11].
1.2 Our Contribution
Our work was motivated by the observation that the
existing schemes [8], [9] did not take into account the
dynamically changing topology of VANET and, conse-
quently, kept either the transmission power of a vehicle or
the QoS related parameters fixed. Indeed, the major
contribution of this work is a new scheme for joint
adaptation of transmission power at the PHY layer and of
the CW size at the MAC layer, according to local vehicle
density and network condition, respectively.
The proposed scheme adapts transmission power dyna-
mically based on estimated local traffic/vehicle density. For
estimating local vehicle density, we use a different
approach than the one proposed by Artimy [8]; as it turns
out, our traffic density approximation is more accurate than
the one in [8], resulting in a more appropriate transmission
range. In addition, we prioritize messages according to their
urgency by incorporating IEEE 802.11e EDCA for timely
propagation of high-priority messages toward the destina-
tion region.
We assume that the vehicles start running the proposed
scheme as soon as they receive traffic-related messages and
note that issues related to incident detection, admission
control, as well as security and privacy of transmitted
messages and participating vehicles, which are important
for ITS, are outside of the scope of this paper.
The remainder of this work is organized as follows: In
Section 2, we discuss the EDCA mechanism of 802.11e and
its role in VANET, and we formally state our problem. In
Section 3, we present the proposed scheme for joint
dynamic adaptation of transmission power and CW values
based on vehicle density estimation and network condition.
In Section 4, we formally state the algorithm for joint power
and CW adaptation followed by presentation of numerical
results obtained from simulations in Section 5. Finally,
Section 6 offers concluding remarks and directions for
future investigations.
2 THE EDCA MECHANISM OF IEEE 802.11e AND
ITS ROLE IN VANET
The IEEE 802.11 standard plays a major role in wireless
networking. Due to their simplicity, scalability, flexibility,
and cost effectiveness, wireless local area networks
(WLANs) based on IEEE 802.11 are among the most widely
deployed WLAN technologies. The fundamental access
mechanism of IEEE 802.11 is applicable to VANET
communications, which use IEEE 802.11p [5], a modified
version of IEEE 802.11a.
It is widely known that the baseline IEEE 802.11 standard
does not provide for the service differentiation necessary for
supporting QoS for time critical data such as voice traffic in
WLAN [12], [13]. In order to address the issue of service
differentiation the IEEE 802.11e standard [4] specifies the
distributed contention-based channel access mechanism,
referred to as EDCA. The EDCA is available in the ad hoc
mode, where no infrastructure is available. The EDCA
scheme relies on CSMA/CA along with a slotted Binary
Exponential Backoff (BEB) mechanism for contention-based
channel access [4] and supports MAC-level QoS and
prioritization of different data/traffic by defining multiple
Access Categories (ACs) with different CW and Arbitration
Interframe Space (AIFS) values.
According to [4] a station with QoS implements four
access categories and there is a set of EDCA parameters
associated with each AC. These parameters include AIFS
[AC] and CW with its minimum and maximum value
CWmin [AC] and CWmax [AC], respectively. Each AC
from every station independently starts a backoff timer after
detecting that the channel is idle for an AIFS [AC] interval
and competes with other ACs for channel access and the
opportunity to transmit. For each AC, the backoff period is
selected from a uniform distribution over [0, CW [AC]]. The
CW size is initially assigned CWmin and doubles when
transmission fails, up to CWmax. The CW size is reinitia-
lized when the CW reached CWmax, and the process is
repeated. We note that the smaller CWmin [AC], the shorter
the channel access delay for the corresponding priority, and
hence the better the chance of the station to access the
channel in a given traffic condition. When an application is
admitted, it has a number of QoS parameters. If two or more
backoff timers within the same station finish backoff at the
same time, there will be a virtual collision which will be
solved by the stations internal scheduler.
We note that MAC protocols for VANET have to consider
different types of traffic messages as well as a rapidly
changing network topology. For example, it is highly
desirable for emergency messages related to traffic incidents
on the roadway to have higher priority than other messages
RAWAT ET AL.: ENHANCING VANET PERFORMANCE BY JOINT ADAPTATION OF TRANSMISSION POWER AND CONTENTION WINDOW... 1529
in order to get rapidchannel access, andthus prioritization of
different messages according to their urgency is an im-
portant requirement in VANET. As a consequence, incorpor-
ati ng EDCA i n VANET enabl es better message
differentiation and ensures that the high-priority messages
get transmission opportunities on a preferential basis.
Furthermore, in congested traffic the network topology is
very dense, while, as soon as the congested region is passed
the network topology may become sparse again. In the
context of broadcast transmission used for V2V commu-
nication, high-transmission power in a region with high-
vehicle density results in high-network load. Therefore,
vehicle density in a given region is a useful metric for
adapting the transmission power.
We present a new method which combines the advan-
tage of dynamic adaptation of transmission power at the
PHY layer as a function of vehicle density with dynamic
adaptation of CW size in EDCA at the MAC layer to
enhance the performance of V2V communications in
VANET. The proposed approach ensures that propagation
and dissemination of prioritized messages will occur with
high throughput and low end-to-end delay.
3 TRANSMISSION POWER ADAPTATION AND
PRIORITIZATION OF MESSAGES
In this section, we describe how transmission range and
transmission power are calculated based on local density of
vehicles and network conditions, and how different mes-
sages are assigneddifferent priorities basedon their urgency.
One of the starting points of our investigation was
provided by the following expression derived in Artimy [8]
for the transmission range (TR) based on the estimated local
vehicle density
T1 min

11 1.

1ln 1
1
r
c1

. 1
where
. c is a constant from traffic flow theory [8],
. 1 is the length of the road segment over which the
vehicle estimates its initial local vehicle density, and
. 1 is the local vehicle density for a given vehicle,
calculated as the ratio 1
`
T`
of the actual number
(`) of vehicles on the road that are present within
its transmission range to the total number (T`) of
vehicles that can be present on the road for current
transmission range, travel speed and safety separa-
tion distance as shown schematically in Fig. 1.
We note that the method used for estimating 1 in [8] is
based solely on the vehicles movement and may not always
give a good estimate of the local traffic density 1. For
instance, when a given vehicle moves at low speed the
method in [8] will estimate that the local vehicle density 1
is high, while when it moves at high speed it will estimate a
low vehicle density 1. In order to improve the accuracy of
the local vehicle density estimate 1, we employ a different
method which uses information obtained from the interac-
tion of a given vehicle with other vehicles in the network.
For this purpose, we note that in the DSRC standard a given
vehicle exchanges its status with neighboring vehicles
approximately 10 times each second [14], and individual
vehicles can use this information to estimate the actual
number of vehicles AN in their vicinity by using the 12-bit
sequence number of the IEEE 802.11 MAC header. We note
also note that this method does not introduce significant
network overhead since it exploits the periodic message in
DSRC enabled systems, and that a similar approach has
been used in [9] in a different context where it was used to
measure the collision.
For example, consider that the current TR for a given
vehicle is 600 m that is obtained from (1) with 1 1.000 m
and the vehicles on the same lane maintain average safety
separation distance of 20 m. For a separated highway with
two lanes of traffic in each direction, the T` for the given
vehicle is calculated as T` % 600,20 2 2 120, while
the ` for the given vehicle is calculated based on the
received information from its neighboring vehicles. As-
suming, for example, that ` 65 we calculate the
estimated vehicle density 1 `,T` % 0.54. Using this
value of 1 the given vehicle will update its transmission
range using (1).
1530 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS, VOL. 22, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2011
Fig. 1. Estimating the local vehicle density 1 on the road for a given vehicle for its transmission range (TR). (a) TN of possible reachable neighbor
vehicles. (b) AN of reachable neighbor vehicles.
The transmission range TR obtained by using the
outlined method for estimating 1 was compared to that
in [8] and the results, plotted in Fig. 2,
1
show that our
method provides a better estimates of the local vehicle
density and, consequently, of the normalized transmission
range
T1
1
, which turns out to be closer to the theoretical
value obtained when the actual vehicle density 1 is used in
(1) instead of its estimates.
3.1 Transmission Power Adaptation
Once the transmission range is obtained using (1), we need
to map it to an actual transmission power value. For this
purpose, we use the lookup table captured in Table 1
containing the transmit power values corresponding to
different transmission ranges. We note that the data in
Table 1 was obtained by simulations of basic wireless
propagation models for different VANET scenarios and a
specific power value is assigned for a given transmission
range interval to include urban, city, and rural environ-
ments. We also note that the lookup table approach is faster
since no computations are required.
3.2 Prioritization of Messages
As discussed in Section 2, the IEEE 802.11e EDCA has the
service differentiation to provide QoS for different types of
messages: voice traffic, video traffic, best effort traffic, and
background traffic [4]. To incorporate the EDCA mechan-
ism in VANET, we categorize the different messages
according to their urgency and delay requirements [7] as
listed in Table 2.
The different access categories in EDCA will have
different QoS parameters associated with them. Table 3
gives the QoS parameters corresponding to the ACs in
802.11e EDCA. The higher the access category number, the
higher the channel access or transmission opportunity will
be. That means the CWmin value for AC(3) will be the least
among all ACs. The backoff counter drawn uniformly from
[0, CW [AC]] will have an initial value of CWmin, implying
that AC(3) will get the highest transmission opportunity
over others. Moreover, high priority classes in turn use a
shorter interframe spacing (IFS) and a smaller CW size, so
that they will get preferential treatment over lower priority
classes. Each vehicle will have four different queues, one for
each priority class with a virtual collision handler to handle
internal collisions.
3.3 Contention Window Size Adaptation
In order to support message differentiation for different
types of messages listed in Table 2 the size of the CW in
Table 3 should also be adapted taking into account the fact
that vehicles that have higher priority messages should not
get the chance to be greedy (i.e., get channel access most of
the time) while higher priority messages should not be
waiting for a long time for the opportunity to transmit.
We note that a vehicle attempting to get transmission
opportunity must wait for the channel to remain idle for the
duration of the AIFS before starting its backoff timer. We
also note that holding channel access for a long time for
higher priority messages may result in a delay in message
propagation which will not be able to notify and/or prevent
incidents on the roadway, such as congestion and traffic-
jam buildups.
RAWAT ET AL.: ENHANCING VANET PERFORMANCE BY JOINT ADAPTATION OF TRANSMISSION POWER AND CONTENTION WINDOW... 1531
Fig. 2. Comparison of normalized transmission range (T1,1) versus
local vehicle density 1 for the proposed scheme (that is running only
Stage 1 of Algorithm 1) and for the method used in [8].
TABLE 1
Lookup Table for Transmission Power Corresponding to a
Given Transmission Range
TABLE 2
Message Priorities [7]
TABLE 3
Priority Specific Parameters [4]
1. The simulation setup used in obtaining Fig. 2 is described in the
supplementary electronic document file, which can be found on the
Computer Society Digital Library at http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/
10.1109/TPDS.2011.41.
Therefore, to mitigate these adverse effects the dynamic
adaptation of QoS parameters, in particular CW sizes, for
different access categories is essential since the backoff
counter value is obtained uniformly from [0, CW [AC]] and
the initial CW value is CWmin. In our proposed approach,
the size of the CW may either increase or decrease, and CW
adaptation is carried out by applying the well-known
approach used in the IEEE 802.11 algorithms by which the
size of window CW [AC] is varied by a factor of two. In
other words, the window size is doubled if one has to
increase the size, and is reduced by half if one has to
decrease its size. The CW size will continue to increase until
it reaches to maximum size of the window, CWmax [AC]
after which it will be reinitialized to CWmin. Thus, in our
proposed approach the window size fluctuates according to
the network conditions observed by a vehicle while in
conventional 802.11 technologies (including EDCA) the size
of the window remains fixed no matter what the network
condition is. We note that the increase in CW [AC] values
(for all ACs maintaining the hierarchy of CW [AC] values as
in EDCA [4]) when the network is congested, will give less
opportunity for all ACs to reduce network load because of
broadcast and rebroadcast. Similarly the decrease in CW
[AC] values (for all ACs maintaining hierarchy of CW
values) when the network has less or no collision, will give
higher opportunity for all ACs. In both cases, the prefer-
ential treatment is preserved by hierarchical increments in
corresponding CW [AC] values.
The local state of the network can be determined as in [9]
by using the record of sequence numbers corresponding to
individual vehicles from which it receives messages. By
using lost sequence numbers each vehicle can calculate the
approximate percentage of lost frames sent by other
vehicles to in a given period of time. Using these statistics
and based on the local reception rate, each vehicle
determines the local state of the network as suggested by
Balon and Guo [9] and can use it to adapt the CW
parameters in the EDCA mechanism. The adaptation of
CW size according to network conditions results in high
throughput and lower delay for high-priority messages,
while lower priority messages also get channel access but
with lower preference over higher priority ones [10].
The throughput obtained by the proposed scheme using
dynamic adaptation of CW values based on network
condition was compared to the one reported by Chen et al.
in [11] and the results, plotted in Fig. 3,
2
show that our
scheme outperforms the one in [11].
4 THE ALGORITHM
Based on the methods discussed in the previous section, we
present an algorithm which adapts both transmitted power
and CW size and which should be run by individual
vehicles periodically to ensure that proper updates of
transmission power and CW [AC] values occur according
to the local vehicle density and the network condition,
respectively. The algorithmis formally stated as Algorithm1
and consists of two stages: transmit power adaptation and
CW size adaptation.
4.1 Dynamic Adaptation of Transmission Power
Initially, individual vehicles start with an arbitrary trans-
mission power and listen for information from other
vehicles. Once a vehicle receives message packets from
other vehicles, it starts to analyze the sequence numbers
and to count the vehicles around its locale. In order to
mitigate the adverse effects of high-transmission power and
to increase the duration of the communication link in case
of low traffic density for intervehicle communication, each
vehicle dynamically adapts its transmission power based on
the estimated local vehicle density. The vehicle density
within its transmission range is calculated using the method
discussed in Section 3.1 which is based on observation of
packets that are currently received and does not introduce
significant network overhead to identify the neighbors of
the vehicle [9]. Using the estimated vehicle density the
algorithm calculates the transmission range using (1), and
then sets up the corresponding transmission power using
the look up Table 1.
We note that maximum transmit power corresponding to
maximum transmission range is selected when either the
local vehicle density 1 is sparse, that is, lower than some
application-dependent threshold value t
1
or when the
vehicle needs to transmit priority 1 messages.
3
The choice
of threshold value t
1
plays a significant role in the
implementation of the algorithm and is also adapted
according to the local density observed by a given vehicle
periodically based on the threshold history for the given
vehicle. Moreover, since the algorithm is employed in a
distributed manner threshold values for different vehicles
might be different.
1532 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS, VOL. 22, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2011
Fig. 3. Throughput versus simulation time for proposed scheme (i.e., by
keeping transmission power fixed and without running the power
adaptation steps of Algorithm 1) and the method used in Chen et al.
[11] for higher priority messages (AC(2) and AC(3)).
2. The simulation setup used to obtain Fig. 3 is described in the
supplementary electronic document file, which can be found on the
Computer Society Digital Library at http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/
10.1109/TPDS.2011.41.
3. Priority 1 messages are transmitted in case of accidents or from
emergency vehicles as shown Table 3. They have low delay requirements
and should propagate on time in a single hop (if possible) within the
maximum transmission range as all vehicles in the destination region seek
emergency related messages, so that they respond to the situation according
to the message received.
Algorithm 1. Joint Adaptation of Transmit Power and
CW Size.
4.2 Dynamic Adaptation of CW Size
Dynamic adaptation of CW size causes changes in the
backoff counter so that timely transmission of messages
occurs according to the network conditions, U, the
perceived collision rate and local vehicle density. The CW
size adaptation is performed as discussed in Section 3.3, in
response to network conditions estimated by analyzing the
received sequence numbers at MAC layer as discussed in
Section 3. The estimated collision rate is an indication of
how congested the network is and how information flow
from a vehicle should be controlled. The dynamic adapta-
tion of the CW size is regulated by a threshold value t
2
. We
note that, as it was the case with the power adaptation,
proper choice of the threshold value t
2
in CW adaptation is
important and affects the performance of the system, and
that the threshold t
2
may also be adapted periodically based
on the network conditions and on the threshold history for a
given vehicle.
5 SIMULATIONS AND NUMERICAL RESULTS
In order to illustrate the performance of the proposed joint
dynamic adaptation scheme, we have simulated Algorithm
1 and have compared it with the default EDCA scheme
which has fixed values for transmission power and QoS
parameters [4]. The simulation setup is described in the
supplementary electronic document file, which can be
found on the Computer Society Digital Library at http://
doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TPDS.2011.41 and its
simulation parameters are summarized in Table 4.
In order to incorporate the EDCA mechanism in VANET
using ns-2, we have mapped the suitable messages with the
corresponding service differentiated EDCA access cate-
gories as listed in Table 2, and have assigned the QoS
parameters for each AC once the message becomes
available at the vehicle.
We illustrate the performance of the proposed joint
dynamic adaptation scheme for transmit power and conten-
tionwindowbycomparingit withthedefault schemeinterms
of the overall throughput and end-to-end message delay in a
scenario consisting of approximately 50 percent highest
priority messages AC(3) andapproximately 50 percent other
types of messages AC (0)-AC (2) in the network. This
corresponds to the third simulation experiment as described
in the supplementary electronic document file, which can be
found on the Computer Society Digital Library at http://
doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TPDS.2011.41. The
RAWAT ET AL.: ENHANCING VANET PERFORMANCE BY JOINT ADAPTATION OF TRANSMISSION POWER AND CONTENTION WINDOW... 1533
TABLE 4
Simulation Parameters
Fig. 4. Overall throughput variation.
throughput variationis plottedFig. 4, andthe average end-to-
end message delay is plotted in Fig. 5.
From Fig. 4, we note that initially (up to approximately
48 s) the throughput value is similar for both schemes since
the vehicles might not be able at first to detect their
neighbors, in order to estimate vehicle density and adjust
their transmission power and CW size values. As soon as
Algorithm 1 start adjusting the transmission power and CW
size according to vehicle density and network condition, the
overall throughput of the proposed scheme is higher than
that of the default scheme.
Fig. 5 shows the average end-to-end delay for 1) all
messages, 2) the highest priorityAC(3) onlymessages,
and 3) the other AC(0)AC(2) categories (all message types
except highest priority). In all cases there is no delay in the
beginning stage (up to approximately 48 s) since all messages
get transmission opportunity as soon as they are available at
the vehicle. Delay at around 50 s is high since vehicles could
not beabletoadapt thepower andCWvalues accordingtothe
vehicle densityandnetworkconditionduringthe initial stage
of the simulation.
As simulation time increases, the delay decreases since
individual vehicles adapt their transmission power and CW
values dynamically according to vehicle density and net-
work condition. As can be observed from Fig. 5 the average
end-to-end delay is lower for the proposed scheme than for
the default scheme in all cases.
6 CONCLUSION
In this paper, we presented a new scheme for reliable
broadcast transmission in vehicular communication with
joint dynamic adaptation of transmission power and CW
size. The scheme incorporates the EDCA medium access
mechanism of IEEE 802.11e in VANET to set priority for
different messages according to their urgency, and consists
of an algorithm by which individual vehicles dynamically
adapt transmission powers according to the estimated local
vehicle densities and adjust CW [AC] for all ACs based on
data collision rate on the network.
Performance of the proposed scheme is illustrated with
numerical results obtained from simulations which show
that better throughput is achieved with lower delay than
when the default scheme is used.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for
their constructive comments on the paper. This work was
supported in part by the National Science Foundation
(NSF) under grant CNS-0721586 and was presented in
part at the 70th IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference
VTC 2009 Fall.
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Danda B. Rawat received the bachelors degree
in computer engineering in 2002, the masters
degree in information and communication en-
gineering from the Tribhuvan University, Kath-
mandu, Nepal, in 2005, and the PhD degree in
electrical and computer engineering from Old
Dominion University, in 2010. His research
interests include areas of wireless communica-
tions and wireless cellular/ad-hoc networks. He
is a member of the IEEE.
Dimitrie C. Popescu received the engineering
diploma and MS degrees from the Polytechnic
Institute of Bucharest, Romania, and the PhD
degree from Rutgers University, all in electrical
engineering. He is currently an assistant pro-
fessor in the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, Old Dominion Univer-
sity. His research interests include areas of
wireless communications, digital signal proces-
sing, and control theory. He is an associate
editor for IEEE Communications Letters, he has served as technical
program chair for the vehicular communications track of the IEEE VTC
2009 Fall, finance chair for the IEEE MSC 2008, and technical program
committee member for the IEEE GLOBECOM, ICC, WCNC, and VTC
conferences. He is a senior member of the IEEE.
Gongjun Yan received the PhD degree in
computer science from Old Dominion Univer-
sity, in 2010, and is currently an assistant
professor in the Department of Natural, Infor-
mation, and Mathematical Sciences, Indiana
University Kokomo. He has been working on the
issues surrounding Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks,
Sensor Networks, and Wireless Communica-
tion. His research interests include security,
privacy, routing, and healthcare. He applies
mathematical analysis to model behavior of complex systems and
integrates existing techniques to provide comprehensive solutions. He
is a member of the IEEE.
Stephan Olariu received the PhD degree in
computer science from the McGill University, in
1986. He is currently a professor in the
Computer Science Department, Old Dominion
University, and is a world-renowned technologist
in the areas of wireless networks, mobile multi-
media systems, parallel and distributed systems,
and architectures and networks. He was invited
and visited more than 120 universities and
research institutes around the world lecturing
on topics ranging from wireless networks and mobile computing, to
biology-inspired algorithms and applications, to telemedicine, to wireless
location systems, and security. He is an associate editor of Networks
and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and serves
on the editorial board of Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing,
Journal of Ad hoc and Sensor Networks, and Parallel, Emergent and
Distributed Systems. He is a senior member of the IEEE.
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RAWAT ET AL.: ENHANCING VANET PERFORMANCE BY JOINT ADAPTATION OF TRANSMISSION POWER AND CONTENTION WINDOW... 1535