Intervehicle Transmission Rate Control for Cooperative Active Safety System

We propose an intervehicle communication framework for the cooperative active safety system (CASS) whose operation is based on the dissemination of each vehicle's state information through a wireless network. Such a CASS requires each subject vehicle to be aware of its surroundings, particularly of the motion and position of other vehicles in its proximity. In this paper, we assume that all vehicles are equipped with onboard communication devices. In such situations, the wireless channel is simultaneously shared by a large number of vehicles, and one of the most difficult challenges in designing CASS is to maintain real-time tracking accuracy of neighboring vehicles while avoiding network congestion and failure. To address this issue, we analyze the problem that multiple scalar linear time-invariant dynamical systems track each other over a multiaccess channel, and then, we propose a rate adaptation algorithm to distributively control the self-information broadcast behavior of each vehicle. The proposed algorithm uses a closed-loop control concept and accounts for the lossy channel. Simulation results show that, if the message generation rate is dynamically adjusted in an on-demand fashion, more accurate and robust tracking performance can be achieved under various traffic conditions.