Non-Cooperative Beacon Power Control for VANETs

In vehicle-to-vehicle communication, every vehicle broadcasts its status information periodically in its beacons to create awareness for surrounding vehicles. However, when the wireless channel is congested by beaconing activity, many beacons are lost due to packet collision. This paper presents a distributed beacon transmission power control algorithm to control channel usage at a desired level. The algorithm is based on game theory, for which the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium is proven. The proposed algorithm is then compared with other congestion control mechanisms using simulation. The results of the simulations indicate that the proposed algorithm is stable and performs better than the others in terms of fairness, bandwidth usage, and the ability to meet application requirements.