A multi-priority supported p-persistent MAC protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The current medium access control (MAC) protocol of the wireless access in vehicular environments (WAVE) system is based on IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) and enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA), which have drawbacks in supporting throughput-sensitive non-safety applications in vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET). In order to address the problem, we propose a novel MAC protocol, namely vehicular MESH network (VMESH), which is specifically designed for the control channel (CCH) and multiple service channels (SCHs) structure of WAVE. A synchronized and distributed beaconing scheme is employed in the VMESH protocol for the purposes of neighborhood awareness and dynamic resource reservation on SCHs. The advantages of the VMESH protocol in supporting the throughput-sensitive non-safety applications in VANET are shown through the theoretical analysis comparing to the current WAVE MAC.

Various ongoing research efforts in Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) related to safety and non-safety applications have been published in academia and industry. One of the main areas in VANET that is still lacking of significant research contributions is toward designing reliable Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols. Existing surveys on MAC protocols in VANET mostly discuss general MAC methods, that include contention-based and contention-free MAC protocols. A hybrid MAC protocol that adopts both contention-based and contention-free MAC, proposed to enhance the network performance in VANET, is fruitful to be explored further. Hence, a survey of hybrid MAC protocols for VANET is presented in this paper. The benefits and limitations of the existing hybrid MAC protocols are discussed based on their classification to provide some insights into the recent advancement of high-performance MAC protocols for vehicular networks. Finally, some open research issues are highlighted as part of future research directions that need further investigations.

Because of the space and time dynamics of moving vehicles, network connectivity is an important performance metric to affect packet delivery in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). Grouping vehicles into platoons in VANETs can improve road safety, change the network connectivity, and even reduce channel access collisions. Unfortunately, network connectivity is often ignored in the design of exiting MAC protocols for VANETs. In this paper, we analyze the connectivity probability and present a connectivity-aware Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for platoon-based VANETs. A multi-priority Markov model is presented to derive the relationship between the connectivity probability and the system saturated throughput. Based on variable traffic status and network connectivity, a multi-channel reservation scheme is adopted to dynamically adjust the length of the Control CHannel (CCH) interval and the Service CHannel (SCH) interval for the improvement of the system performance, in terms of network throughput and the priority packet transmission opportunities for platoons. As a result, some important observations to the design and analysis of such communication systems are provided. © 2015 IEEE

Highly dynamic geographical topology, two-direction mobility, and varying traffic density can lead to fairness issues in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). The Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol plays a vital role in sharing the common wireless channel efficiently between vehicles in a VANET system. However, ensuring fairness between vehicles can be a challenge in designing MAC protocols for VANET systems. The existing protocol, IEEE 802.11 DCF, ensures that the packet transmission rate for a particular vehicle is directly proportional to the amount of time a vehicle spends within a service area, but it does not guarantee that faster vehicles will be able to send the minimum number of packets. Other existing MAC protocols based on IEEE 802.11 are able to provide a minimum amount of data transmission regardless of velocity, but are unable to provide an amount of data transmission that is more proportionate to the time a vehicle spends in the service area. To address the above limitations, we propose a Speed Aware Fairness Enabled MAC (SAFE-MAC) protocol that calculates the residence time of a vehicle in a service area by using mobility metrics such as position, direction, and speed to synthesize the transmission probability of each individual vehicle with respect to its residence time. This is achieved by dynamically altering the values of parameters such as minimum contention window, maximum backoff stage, and retransmission limit in the MAC protocol. We then develop an analytical model to compare the performance of our proposed protocol with contemporary MAC protocols. Numerical analysis results show that our proposed protocol significantly improves fairness among the speed-varying vehicles in VANET.

In this paper, we propose a cognitive radio based Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for packet scheduling in wireless networks. Cognitive MAC protocols allow a class of users, called secondary users, to identify the unused frequency spectrum and to communicate without interfering with the primary users. In our proposed MAC protocol, each secondary user is equipped with two transceivers. One of the transceivers is used for control messages while the other periodically senses and dynamically utilizes the unused data channel. The secondary users report the status of channels on control channel and negotiate on the selected data channel itself for onward data transmission. Each channel is used by different set of secondary users. Contrary to existing protocols, data transmission takes place in the time slot in which spectrum opportunity is found. We develop a new analytical model, while taking into account the backoff mechanism. Our simulation results show that throughput increases with the increase in the number of channels.

Recent advances over wireless communication devices and introduction of highly computational vehicles have made research in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) very interesting for both academic and industry. Practical application and implementation of VANET is on full swing in many countries but the robust and reliable Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism is still a challenge. Ensuring dissemination of delay-intolerant time critical safety messages, GPS requirement, and the dependency on the leader node are some of the inherent issues in almost all proposed MAC protocols. In this research article, the proposed scheme addresses these issues with better channel utilization and lower latency in conjunction with enhanced throughput by dividing the vehicles into two clusters. The clusters work independently, and they communicate amongst themselves using a separate channel. So, they enhance channel utilization and partially guaranty the delivery of safety message in critical time. The scheme uses the simplest MAC, CSMA/CA in cluster formation. So, there stands no question of global synchronization (GPS) for the communication.

International audience

Full-duplex MAC protocol using buffer status reports during unused uplink periods in WLAN

Contention-based medium access control (MAC) protocols for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), such as IEEE 802.11p, have been revealed inefficient performance due to merging collisions, hidden terminal problems, poor resource utilization, and inconsistency in various traffic scenarios. This paper proposes a novel clustering-based contention-free MAC (CC-MAC) protocol to handle intra-cluster and inter-cluster transmission collision problems in VANETs. A cluster head (CH) assigns the time slots to the cluster members depending on their traffic demands. Inter-cluster interference among vehicles is minimized by comparing the relative offset time and reducing access delay during the slot allocation. Furthermore, a TDMA-based predetermined scheme is proposed to improve resource utilization for both control channel and service channels, and merging collisions are resolved by disjointed slot assignment. Hidden terminal problem is resolved by detecting slot assignment identification on gateway vehicles regarding the direction of the vehicle’s mobility. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the IEEE 802.11p, STCM, and optimized CB-MAC protocols in both highway and urban traffic scenarios in terms of normalized throughput, packet delivery ratio and average end-to-end delay.

Designing QoS-aware medium access control (MAC) scheme is a challenging issue in vehicular ad hoc networks. Proportional fairness and bandwidth utilization are among the significant requirements that should be taken into account by a MAC scheme. In this paper, a bandwidth-efficient and fair multichannel MAC protocol is proposed to address these two requirements, specifically in vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The proposed scheme is based on clustering of vehicles and exploits time division multiple access (TDMA) method alongside the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance mechanism to allocate DSRC-based resources in a different manner from IEEE 802.11p/IEEE 1609.4 protocols. It divides each channel into aligned dynamic-sized time frames. In each time frame, in a fully TDMA-based period, transmission opportunities are assigned to vehicles letting them have dedicated transmissions on the service and control channels. The maximum number of transmission opportunities per each frame is determined by the cluster head (CH) based on a defined optimization problem which aims at maximizing both proportional fairness and bandwidth utilization. Furthermore, the bandwidth utilization is assumed to be enhanced more through reallocation of unused transmission opportunities in each time frame, using a proposed reallocation algorithm. The proposed MAC protocol is treated as a lightweight scheme such that various types of unicast, multicast and broadcast communications are possible within the cluster without involving the CH. Evaluation results show that the proposed scheme has more than 90 % achievement in terms of proportional fairness and bandwidth utilization simultaneously, and in this case, has a considerable superiority over TC-MAC. In addition, using the proposed scheme, the satisfaction level of vehicles is preserved appropriately.

Power efficient ultra-wideband based wireless communication for wireless body area network applications

In this paper we propose a simple relay enabled medium access (SRMAC) protocol that enables cooperative relay transmissions. Due to the wireless signal power attenuation with distance, using a relay in a wireless network can make wireless networking more bandwidth efficient at the expense of requiring multiple transmissions for a single packet. Standard MAC protocols such as the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, while useable with relaying, however are not designed explicitly for relay communication. When IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is used for cooperative communication such a relaying, each packet transmission would need to separately contend for the channel via a channel access procedure which can use significant resources (both energy and bandwidth). Because using a single relay requires two transmissions, an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol that supports two hop transmission is needed. We introduce a protocol, SRMAC, which is a simple cooperative MAC protocol that utilizes information from the physical layer for the MAC operation of relay networks. We consider the bandwidth efficiency of SRMAC protocol considering both the physical layer and MAC layer. The SRMAC protocol includes the possibility of both cooperative transmission and direct transmission. With SRMAC, cooperative transmission (relaying) can be dynamically chosen when it is more beneficial than direct transmission. The SRMAC protocol can improve the throughput by up to 20% compared to conventional MAC protocols.

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging and promising technology, which allows vehicles while moving on the road to communicate and share resources. These resources are aimed at improving traffic safety and providing comfort to drivers and passengers. The resources use applications that have to meet high reliability and delay constraints. However, to implement these applications, VANET relies on medium access control (MAC) protocol. Many approaches have been proposed in the literature using time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme to enhance the efficiency of MAC protocol. Nevertheless, this technique has encountered some challenges including access and merging collisions due to inefficient time slot allocation strategy and hidden terminal problem. Despite several attempts to study this class of protocol, issues such as channel access and time slot scheduling strategy have not been given much attention. In this paper, we have relatively examined the most prominent TDMA MAC protocols which were proposed in the literature from 2010 to 2018. These protocols were classified based on scheduling strategy and the technique adopted. Also, we have comparatively analyzed them based on different parameters and performance metrics used. Finally, some open issues are presented for future deployment.

The directional medium access control (MAC) protocol improves the throughput of mobile ad hoc networks but has a deafness problem and requires location information for neighboring nodes. In the dual-channel directional MAC protocol [12], the use of omnidirectional packets does not require the exact location of destination node. In this letter, we propose a tone dual-channel MAC protocol with directional antennas to improve the throughput of mobile ad hoc networks. In the proposed MAC protocol, we use a directional CTS and an out-of-band directional DATA tone with a new blocking algorithm to improve the spatial reuse. We confirm the throughput performance of the proposed MAC protocol by computer simulations using the Qualnet simulator.

In this paper, a novel Network Coding (NC)-aided
\nMedium Access Control (MAC) protocol with mobility support
\n(NCMOB-MAC) is presented. The proposed protocol is compatible
\nwith Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) techniques and can be
\napplied in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). NCMOB-MAC
\nproposes a new way of coordinating the communication between
\na sender, a moving destination and a set of fixed relay nodes.
\nThe relays employ different Contention Window (CW) sizes to
\nassign priorities and optimize the NC opportunities. Extensive
\nsimulations have been carried out to evaluate the performance of
\nthe protocol and the results show an improvement in throughput
\nand energy efficiency compared to conventional NC-aided MAC
\nprotocols.