Improving VANET performance with heuristic and adaptive fuzzy logic scheme

Rapid topology change in vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is common due to the inherent high mobility nodes and unpredictable environments in VANET. In order to ensure efficient packet transmission, nodes in VANET should react adaptively to topology change in VANET. In this paper, we present a new heuristic and adaptive fuzzy logic scheme (HaFL), which adapts the contention window size and transmission power according to network and traffic conditions. The current existing schemes in VANET utilize only a single parameter to optimize the contention window and transmission power without consideration on the effects of interference as one of the main factors in VANET transmission degradation. In VANET, packet loss can occur at different stages of transmission due to interference or due to elapsed time. In the proposed HaFL, fuzzy logic is used to adaptively optimize the contention window size based on three parameters namely collision rate, SINR and queue overflow which represent packet drop at different stages of transmission. Transmission power which is usually a static parameter is also optimized with consideration on the effects of VANET interference in the proposed HaFL. The performance of the proposed HaFL is evaluated in Vehicles in Network Simulation with road traffic simulator, Simulation of Urban mobility. Simulation results show that the proposed HaFL demonstrates adaptability with improved throughput, low end-to-end delay and higher packet success rate in comparison with the default IEEE802.11p and existing schemes.

First published online: 01 March 2015