Advanced Activity-Aware Multi-Channel Operations with IEEE 1609.4 in VANETs for Vehicular Clouds

The Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) technology has been used in Vehicular communication to enable short-lived safety and non-safety applications based on Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communications in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). VANETs are used by spontaneously creating a wireless network of vehicles with high mobility and fixed infrastructure. It presents numerous challenges for protocols and applications design to meet low latency and high data rate requirements of vehicular applications. With the under-utilized advanced computation, communication and storage resources in On-Board Units (OBUs) of modern vehicles, Vehicular Clouds (VCs) are used to manage coalitions of affordable resources in Vehicles being in the same area in order to host infotainment applications used by other vehicles on the move. To better serve non-safety applications, it is highly desirable that VCs take advantage of the maximum usage of Service Channels (SCHs) while taking into consideration the V2V safety messages exchanged between Vehicles over the Control Channel (CCH). In this paper, we introduce an Advanced Activity-Aware (AAA) scheme for Multi-Channel Operations based on 1609.4 of the MAC Protocol in Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) standard. The AAA aims at dynamically achieving an optimal setup of Control Channel Interval (CCHI) and Service Channel Interval (SCHI) by reducing the inactivity interval while maintaining a default Synchronization Interval (SI) between all vehicles. We evaluate the performance of our proposed AAA scheme through real-time simulation of vehicular cloud load and VANET communications using ns-3. The simulation results indicate that our proposed scheme increases significantly the throughput of the VC and reduces the average number of dropped Virtual Machines (VMs) and the average delay of uploaded packets of non-safety applications from the VC to the Road Side Unit (RSU), while maintaining a V2V safety broadcasting similar to that of the IEEE 1609.4 Standard for Multi-Channel Operations.