Intelligent transportation systems have recently become a promising technology for future industry to provide safe, green, and automated driving. In this regard, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has proposed to utilize cellular communication to enable direct communication between vehicles with and without cellular infrastructure assistance. 3GPP has introduced the Sensing-Based Semi-Persistent Scheduling (S-SPS) technique when coverage of the cellular system is absent. S-SPS faces resource collision and performance degradation problems when channel load increases in the network. This paper suggests a decentralized congestion control and transmission power control mechanism (TPC-DCC) with an adaptive threshold for the received signal as a combination method to decrease channel load in the network. Furthermore, this work introduces a novel channel load adjustment. The new adjusting algorithm is based on a constant difference between the upper and lower boundaries of channel load at each level to handle channel overload and provide more flexibility using DCC mechanisms. The interactions of the proposed algorithm with S-SPS and the Extended-Estimation Reservation Resource Allocation (E-ERRA) algorithms that the authors previously proposed are investigated. The results indicate that system performance can be substantially improved when the transmission power and reception threshold are adaptively adjusted to the proposed channel load adjustment. The results of E-ERRA with the proposed channel load adjustment method show promising results compared to S-SPS.INDEX TERMS C-V2X, decentralized congestion control, resource collision, S-SPS, E-ERRA.
I. INTRODUCTIONIntelligent transportation systems and automated vehicles will soon be an essential part of future technologies used every day. For many years, dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) based on the IEEE 802.11p standard have been used as the only solution that supports vehicular communication [1]. 3GPP in Release 14 standardized new advanced LTE features to enable basic safety applications using direct information exchange through the SideLink (SL) communication link. SL communication takes place between vehicles themselves and between vehicles and surrounding nodes, such as roadside units, cellular and road infrastructure, and cellular devices. Vehicle communication can be supported by cellular infrastructure or not [2]. This technology is known as Cellular-Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) orThe associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Hassan Omar .