A Technique to Improve the Broadcast Performance of WAVE Protocol in Vehicular Networks

Vehicular networks have emerged as a vital technology in developing intelligent transportation systems (ITS), where the Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) system plays a crucial role in enabling Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications. However, WAVE standards face significant challenges in supporting reliable and scalable broadcast services in saturated network conditions with hidden terminal problems and start-of-interval contention issues. This paper studies the performance of the WAVE protocol stack, particularly the MAC sublayer, in saturated broadcast vehicular networks using simulation. We propose a centralized and adaptive contention window adjustment approach to enhance the packet delivery ratio. The proposed method dynamically adjusts the contention window size based on the network state, leading to a 40% improvement in packet delivery ratio at the MAC level and a 10% improvement at the application level.