Abstract -In this paper the medium access control (MAC) method of the upcoming vehicular communication standard IEEE 802.11p has been simulated in a highway scenario with periodic broadcast of time-critical packets (so-called heartbeat messages) in a vehicle-to-vehicle situation. The 802.11p MAC method is based on carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) where nodes listen to the wireless channel before sending. If the channel is busy, the node must defer its access and during high utilization periods this could lead to unbounded delays. This well-known property of CSMA is undesirable for time-critical communications. The simulation results reveal that a specific node/vehicle is forced to drop over 80% of its heartbeat messages because no channel access was possible before the next message was generated. To overcome this problem, we propose to use self-organizing time division multiple access (STDMA) for real-time data traffic between vehicles. This MAC method is already successfully applied in commercial surveillance applications for ships (AIS) and airplanes (VDL mode 4). Our initial results indicate that STDMA outperforms CSMA for time-critical traffic safety applications in ad hoc vehicular networks.
The channel access delay of the DSRC has been analyzed in REF and compared with a self-organizing timedivision multiple-access scheme, which has been proven more suitable for VANETs' real-time applications.
Evaluation of the IEEE 802.11p MAC Method for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication
2008 IEEE 68th Vehicular Technology Conference
2008 IEEE 68th Vehicular Technology Conference
Computer Science