A Topology-Independent TDMA MAC Policy for Safety Applications in Vehicular Networks

Abstract

The problem of accessing the medium to support safety applications in vehicular networks is challenging, when vehicles’ mobility increases and time constraints become tight. In such environments, and particularly for vehicular-to-vehicular communication where safety is the main concern, time delay bounded data packet delivery is a prerequisite. Consequently, topology-independent MAC policies that guarantee a number of successful transmissions independently of the underlying topology, can be employed as a suitable choice for the particular vehicular environment. One such policy is revisited in this paper and its performance is demonstrated against VeMAC – a well-established MAC protocol in the area of vehicular networks – using simulation results. As it is shown in this paper, throughput under the considered topology-independent policy remains comparable to that of VeMAC whereas the number of retransmissions are significantly reduced leading to a reduced time delay.