Abstract
Vehicular ad hoc networks are expected to provide a reliable networking platform for cooperative safety communication systems. Those systems are of a broadcast nature and require to deliver both safety messages and vehicle tracking information while being interfered by other types of lower priority messages on the same channel. Vehicle tracking information are necessary to enable safety communication systems and intelligent transportation systems. Due to the large number of communicating vehicles and the amount of traffic exchanged in the broadcast mode, network congestion often occurs in vehicular communication systems. In this paper, a new methodology for avoiding such a network congestion is proposed. We identify the sparsity of the vehicle tracking information and propose a novel information recovery scheme. The proposed scheme reduces the amount of data exchanged due to vehicle tracking packets while providing a robust information reception at the receivers. Essentially, it utilizes compressive sensing to transmit a few measurements of the vehicles velocity vector that allows perfect recovery of the original vector at the receiver with a minimal error. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of applying compressive sensing in recovering vehicles tracking information, and relieving the network from unnecessary congestion due to the large amount of data exchanged.