CMD: A Multichannel Coordination Scheme for Emergency Message Dissemination in IEEE 1609.4

The IEEE 1609.4 legacy standard for multichannel communications in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), specifies that the control channel (CCH) is dedicated to broadcast safety messages, while the service channels (SCHs) are dedicated to transmit infotainment service content. However, the SCHs can be used as an alternative to transmit high priority safety messages in the event that they are invoked during the service channel interval (SCHI). This implies that there is a need to transmit safety messages across multiple available utilized channels to ensure that all vehicles receive the safety message. Transmission across multiple SCHs using the legacy IEEE 1609.4 requires multiple channel switching and therefore introduces further end-to-end delays. Given that safety messaging is a life critical application, it is important that optimal end-to-end delay performance is derived in multichannel VANET scenarios to ensure reliable safety message dissemination. To tackle this challenge, three primary contributions are in this article: first, a cooperative multichannel coordinator (CMD) selection approach based on the least average separation distance (LAD) to the vehicles that expect to tune to other SCHs and operates during the control channel interval (CCHI) is proposed. Second, a model to determine the optimal time intervals in which CMD operates during the CCHI is proposed. Third, a contention back-off mechanism for safety message transmission during the SCHI is proposed. Computer simulations and mathematical analysis show that CMD performs better than the legacy IEEE 1609.4 and a selected state-of-the-art multichannel message dissemination scheme in terms of end-to-end delay and packet reception ratio.