Stability analysis of congestion control schemes in vehicular ad-hoc networks

Cooperative vehicle safety (CVS) systems operate based on broadcast of vehicle position and safety information to neighboring cars. The communication medium of CVS is a vehicular ad-hoc network. One of the main challenges in large scale deployment of CVS systems is the issue of scalability. To address the scalability problem, several congestion control methods have been proposed and are currently under field study. These algorithms adapt transmission rate and power based on network measures such as channel busy ratio. We examine two such algorithms and study their dynamic behavior in time and space to evaluate stability (in time) and fairness (in space) properties of these algorithms. We present stability conditions and evaluate stability and fairness of the algorithms through simulation experiments. Results show that there is a trade-off between fast convergence, temporal stability and spatial fairness. The proper ranges of parameters for achieving stability are presented for the discussed algorithms. Stability is verified for all typical highway density cases for static traffic as well as real scenarios. Fairness is shown to be naturally achieved for some algorithms and its analysis is under study in another work of us. Under the same conditions other algorithms may have problem to maintain fairness in space. We have shown that this can be resolved by a distributed measurement of CBR and is verified.