A Hidden Markov Model based scheme for efficient and fast dissemination of safety messages in VANETs

Nowadays, Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication is attracting an increasing attention from car manufacturers due to its expected impact in improving driving safety and comfort. IEEE 802.11P is the primary channel access scheme used by vehicles; however it does not provide sufficient spectrum to ensure reliable exchange of safety information. To overcome this issue, many efforts have been devoted to enhance the frequency spectrum utilization efficiency. To this end, the Cognitive Radio (CR) principle has been applied to assist the vehicles to gain extra bandwidth through an opportunistic use of the unused spectrums in their surrounding. In this paper, we focus on safety messages for which we propose an original scheme that makes their exchange among the nearby vehicles more reliable with a significant reduce in their dissemination delay. This improvement is due to the use of a Hidden Markov Model that enables the prediction of the available channels for the subsequent time slots, leading to faster channel allocation for the vehicles. The obtained simulation results confirm the efficiency of our scheme.