A-VeMAC: An Adaptive Vehicular MAC Protocol
for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks
Ping Chen, Jun Zheng, and Yuying Wu
National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory
Southeast University
Si Pai Lou, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210096, China
Email: {pingchen, junzheng, yuyingwu}@seu.edu.cn
Abstract—This paper proposes an adaptive vehicular MAC
protocol, called A-VeMAC, for VANETs. A-VeMAC is a multi-
channel MAC protocol based on VeMAC. Like VeMAC, it
employs a TDMA mechanism, and supports one control channel
and several service channels. For the control channel, each
frame is partitioned into two disjoint sets of timeslots, which are
associated with vehicles moving in opposite directions,
respectively. Unlike VeMAC, which equally partitions each
frame, the frame partitioning with A-VeMAC is not equal.
Instead, it can adaptively vary with the vehicle traffic conditions
in opposite directions. The purpose is to better support
unbalanced vehicle traffic conditions in opposite conditions.
With A-VeMAC, a vehicle will first make an adjustment of
frame partitioning based on the current traffic conditions in
opposite directions before it attempts to reserve a timeslot. After
the frame partitioning adjustment is completed, it will determine
a set of timeslots that are available for it to reserve and then
randomly selects one for reservation from the available timeslots.
For the service channels, A-VeMAC employs the same access
mechanism used in VeMAC. Simulation results show that A-
VeMAC can well support both balanced and unbalanced vehicle
traffic conditions, and can achieve a better performance than
VeMAC in terms of the channel utilization and the access
collision rate, in particular, under unbalanced traffic conditions.
Keywords—A-VeMAC; adaptive protocol; MAC; vehicular
ad hoc network
I. INTRODUCTION
Medium access control (MAC) is a critical issue in the
design of a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) [1]. In a
VANET, multiple nodes may need to transmit data via a
common radio channel simultaneously, which would cause
data collision and thus affect the access performance of the
network. In order to avoid potential data collision, each node
must employ a MAC protocol to coordinate the channel
access of multiple nodes and handle collision problems. Due
to the unique characteristics of VANETs, however, such as
high node mobility, frequent topology change, and predictable
mobility model [2], existing MAC protocols for mobile ad
hoc networks cannot directly be employed in a VANET. To
achieve good access performance, it is necessary to design
efficient MAC protocols for VANETs.
The IEEE 802.11p [3] is a typical MAC protocol for
VANET, which employs CSMA/CA as the basic channel
access mechanism and can deal with high node mobility and
frequent topology change. However, the CSMA/CA
mechanism of IEEE 802.11p has several limitations. First, for
a broadcast service, the access mechanism neither uses an
RTS/CTS exchange during the access procedure nor uses an
acknowledgement message after a node receives a message.
This makes it difficult to handle the hidden terminal problem,
i.e., a collision occurs at a node when two other nodes which
are not in each other’s one-hop neighborhood communicate
with the node simultaneously, and thus would reduce the
message delivery ratio of a network. Second, it employs a
carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance
(CSMA/CA) mechanism, in which every node owns the same
opportunity to access the channel. Even if a node has a critical
safety message to send, it cannot access the channel
immediately if the channel is busy at that time. Therefore,
IEEE 802.11p cannot ensure timely delivery of critical safety
messages.
In contrast, a TDMA-based MAC protocol can address
this problem to a certain degree. The ADHOC MAC protocol
proposed in [4] is a typical one which is based on a
completely distributed access mechanism, the Reliable R-
ALOHA (RR-ALOHA) [5], and operates in a time-slotted
structure. With ADHOC MAC, each node can acquire an
exclusive timeslot to transmit its messages, which can
improve timely delivery of safety messages. Moreover, each
node must transmit frame information (FI) in its timeslot to
indicate the status of each timeslot and thus can handle the
hidden terminal problem. Due to the node mobility, however,
merging collisions may occur frequently [6]. In that case,
each node involving a merging collision will lose its timeslot
and then attempts to reserve a new timeslot, which would lead
to more access collisions. Such collisions would increase the
time for a vehicle to reserve a timeslot, and thus reduce the
efficiency of channel access and degrade the delay and
throughput performance in message delivery. Another major
limitation of ADHOC MAC is that it is a single channel
protocol, not suitable for the seven DSRC channels.
To address the limitations of the ADHOC MAC protocol,
a VeMAC protocol was proposed in [7], which is able to
support multi-channels. VeMAC supports one control channel
and several service channels. The control channel is used for
transmitting high-priority short information and control
information, while the service channels are used for
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation o
China under Grant No. 61372105 and the Six Talent Peaks Project in Jiangsu
Province under Grant No. 2013-DZXX-010.
IEEE ICC 2017 Ad-Hoc and Sensor Networking Symposium
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