Impacts of Radio Access Protocols on Cooperative Collision Avoidance in Urban Traffic Intersection Scenarios

Abstract

This paper presents a performance comparison between the DSRC-recommended 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) and a novel Vehicular Self-Organizing MAC (VeSOMAC) protocol in the context Intelligent Transportation System applications. VeSOMAC is a distributed TDMA protocol that relies on in-band control exchange for autonomous and self-configurable TDMA slot allocation. Detailed network and vehicular traffic models have been developed for a Cooperative Collision Control (CCA) application operating in urban traffic intersection scenarios. Simulation results demonstrate that unlike the 802.11 style contention based protocols, VeSOMAC can offer better vehicle safety through smaller and bounded packet latency in vehicular ad hoc networks.