Highly Reliable MAC Protocol Based on Associative Acknowledgement for Vehicular Network

Abstract

IEEE 1609/802.11p standard obligates each vehicle to broadcast a periodic basic safety message (BSM). The BSM message comprises a positional and kinematic information of a transmitting vehicle. It also contains emergency information that is to be delivered to all the target receivers. In broadcast communication, however, existing carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) medium access control (MAC) protocol cannot guarantee a high reliability as it suffers from two chronic problems, namely, access collision and hidden terminal interference. To resolve these problems of CSMA MAC, we propose a novel enhancement algorithm called a neighbor association-based MAC (NA-MAC) protocol. NA-MAC utilizes a time division multiple access (TDMA) to distribute channel resource into short time-intervals called slots. Each slot is further divided into three parts to conduct channel sensing, slot acquisition, and data transmission. To avoid a duplicate slot allocation among multiple vehicles, NA-MAC introduces a three-way handshake process during slot acquisition. Our simulation results revealed that NA-MAC improved packet reception ratio (PRR) by 19% and successful transmission by 30% over the reference protocols. In addition, NA-MAC reduced the packet collisions by a factor of 4. Using the real on-board units (OBUs), we conducted an experiment where our protocol outperformed in terms of PRR and average transmission interval by 82% and 49%, respectively.