In vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, each vehicle should periodically disseminate a beacon message including the kinematics information, such as position, speed, steering, etc., so that a neighbor vehicle can better perceive and predict the movement of the vehicle. However, a simple broadcasting of such messages may lead to a low reception probability as well as an excessive delay. In this paper, we attempt to analyze the impact of the following key parameters of the beacon dissemination on the performance of vehicular networks: beacon period, carrier-sensing range, and contention window (CW) size. We first derive a beacon period which is inversely proportional to the vehicle speed. Next, we mathematically formulate the maximum beacon load to demonstrate the necessity of the transmit power control. We finally present an approximate closed-form solution of the optimal CW size that leads to the maximum throughput of beacon messages in vehicular networks.