Low Delay Inter-Packet Coding in Vehicular Networks

In Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITSs), vehicles need to wirelessly connect with Roadside units (RSUs) over limited durations when such point-to-point connections are possible. One example of such communications is the downloading of maps to the C-ITS vehicles. Another example occurs in the testing of C-ITS vehicles, where the tested vehicles upload trajectory records to the roadside units. Because of real-time requirements, and limited bandwidths, data are sent as User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets. We propose an inter-packet error control coding scheme that improves the recovery of data when some of these packets are lost; we argue that the coding scheme has to be one of convolutional coding. We measure performance through the session averaged probability of successfully delivering groups of packets. We analyze two classes of convolution codes and propose a low-complexity decoding procedure suitable for network applications. We conclude that Reed–Solomon convolutional codes perform better than Wyner–Ash codes at the cost of higher complexity. We show this by simulation on the memoryless binary erasure channel (BEC) and channels with memory, and through simulations of the IEEE 802.11p DSRC/ITS-G5 network at the C-ITS test track AstaZero.