Applied Sciences, Vol. 13, Pages 3640: A Reinforcement Learning-Based Congestion Control Approach for V2V Communication in VANET

Applied Sciences, Vol. 13, Pages 3640: A Reinforcement Learning-Based Congestion Control Approach for V2V Communication in VANET

Applied Sciences doi: 10.3390/app13063640

Authors: Xiaofeng Liu Ben St. Amour Arunita Jaekel

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are crucial components of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) aimed at enhancing road safety and providing additional services to vehicles and their users. To achieve reliable delivery of periodic status information, referred to as basic safety messages (BSMs) and event-driven alerts, vehicles need to manage the conflicting requirements of situational awareness and congestion control in a dynamic environment. To address this challenge, this paper focuses on controlling the message transmission rate through a Markov decision process (MDP) and solves it using a novel reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm. The proposed RL approach selects the most suitable transmission rate based on the current channel conditions, resulting in a balanced performance in terms of packet delivery and channel congestion, as shown by simulation results for different traffic scenarios. Additionally, the proposed approach offers increased flexibility for adaptive congestion control through the design of an appropriate reward function.