Performance study and optimization of multi-channel allocation in VANET under physical channel model Selo Sulistyo 1 • Sahirul Alam 1 Published online: 6 June 2018 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Vehicular networking has a promising potential as a communication medium to relay the information related with the road safety, traffic efficiency and infotainment and thus many researches are conducted in this area. This research presents a study of multi-channel allocation in orthogonal frequency multiple access vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) under physical channel model. The performance of channel allocation using the altered number of channels allocated per vehicle is observed. An optimization method for channel allocation is also presented. The optimization method is based on meta- heuristic approach namely bacterial foraging optimization algorithm (DBFO). The sets of channels allocated to vehicles are represented by the position of bacterium. To improve the performance of channel allocation, the signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) of vehicles is used as the objective function of DBFO. Hence, DBFO is utilized to find the appropriate channels for vehicles so that the SINR and the throughput of vehicles can be increased. The performances of multi-channel allocation in VANET and the proposed optimization method are observed through the extensive simulations. The results of the simulations show that increasing the number of channels allocated per vehicle can decrease the SINR average since the interference level increases. Meanwhile the vehicle throughput increases since the more channels allocated to vehicles means the more bandwidth utilized. Keywords Vehicular ad hoc network  Orthogonal frequency multiple access  Channel allocation  Discrete bacterial foraging optimization 1 Introduction Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a wireless self- configuring network implemented in vehicle domain. Vehicle communication with other vehicles or infrastruc- tures can be useful for the driver to provide information related with the road safety, traffic efficiency and man- agement, and infotainment applications [1, 2]. The uti- lization of vehicular network is promising to relay the information in real time as well as to offload the data traffic in cellular networks for some applications. In VANET, wireless networking devices are installed on vehicles, thus each vehicle acts as the wireless node that can move while forming the networks. Instead of the VANET’s potential, the accompaniment challenges have also drawn the interest of the researchers. The licensed spectrum for VANET in 5.8 and 5.9 GHz band and the allocated 700 MHz [2] band provide the large channel bandwidth at least 10 MHz. Thus, the proper channel allocation can exploit the potential of VANET especially to improve the throughput or capacity of the network. Research in [3] propose a channel resource negotiation using three-way handshake and an adaptive distributed channel scheduling algorithm. In [4], the pro- tocol for channel allocation in VANET which is centralized and managed by the road side unit (RSU) is proposed related with two issues: efficient allocation of limited bandwidth and timely critical messages delivery over shared wireless channel. In [5], channel assignment to reduce interference is implemented in routing protocol for & Selo Sulistyo selo@ugm.ac.id Sahirul Alam sahirul.alam@gmail.com 1 Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Jalan Grafika No. 2, Yogyakarta 55281, Indonesia 123 Wireless Networks (2019) 25:4785–4797 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-018-1770-8