Safety Driving Support Using CDMA Inter-Vehicle Communications

Although the near-far effect has been considered to be the major issue preventing CDMA from being used in ad-hoc networks, in this paper, we show that the near-far effect is not a severe issue in inter-vehicle networks for safety driving support, where packet transmissions are generally performed in the broadcast manner. Indeed, the near-far effect provides extremely reliable transmissions between near nodes, regardless of node density, which cannot be achieved by CSMA/CA. However, CDMA cannot be directly applied in realistic traffic accident scenarios, where highly reliable transmissions are required between far nodes as well. This paper proposes to apply packet forwarding and transmission scheduling methods that try to expand the area, where reliable transmissions are achievable. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly excels a CSMA/CA-based scheme in terms of delivery ratio and delay under realistic traffic accident scenarios. Specifically, the proposed scheme achieves approximately 90% of delivery ratio and 4 milliseconds of end-to-end delay in a scenario, where the CSMA/CA scheme achieves 60% of delivery ratio and 80 milliseconds of delay.