Burst transmission and frame aggregation for inter-vehicle communications

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), due to highly mobile and frequently changing topology, available resources and transmission opportunities are restricted. Transmitting frames efficiently within transmission opportunities is very important for system performance. Generally, there are many transmissions between many senders and receivers in a congested environment, which leads to network congestion and reduces transmission efficiency. To address this, we propose a burst transmission and frame aggregation (FAB) scheme to enhance transmission opportunity (TXOP) efficiency of IEEE 802.11p. The proposed scheme considers aggregation and TXOP techniques. Such techniques are useful for improving transmission performance. FAB aggregates frames in the relay node and utilizes the TXOP to transmit these frames to the next hop with a burst transmission. FAB also select multiple relay nodes to improve the efficiency of data forwarding if data is large and can not be forwarded by the node with the largest weight value. This FAB scheme increases transmission efficiency within one TXOP while decreasing transmission overheads. FAB can also support traffics with multiple classes. The proposed strategy is evaluated using various metrics such as end-to-end delays, collision rates, and transmission overheads. Simulation results show that the proposed FAB scheme can significantly improve the performance of inter-vehicle communications.