Beaconing Approaches in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: A Survey

A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a type of wireless ad hoc network that facilitates ubiquitous connectivity between vehicles in the absence of fixed infrastructure. Beaconing approaches is an important research challenge in high mobility vehicular networks with enabling safety applications. In this article, we perform a survey and a comparative study of state-of-the-art adaptive beaconing approaches in VANET, that explores the main advantages and drawbacks behind their design. The survey part of the paper presents a review of existing adaptive beaconing approaches such as adaptive beacon transmission power, beacon rate adaptation, contention window size adjustment and Hybrid adaptation beaconing techniques. The comparative study of the paper compares the representatives of adaptive beaconing approaches in terms of their objective of study, summary of their study, the utilized simulator and the type of vehicular scenario. After implementing the representatives of beaconing approaches, we analysed the simulation results and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of these beaconing approaches with regard to their suitability to vehicular networks. Finally, we discussed the open issues and research directions related to VANET adaptive beaconing approaches.