An Infrastructure-Free Slot Assignment Algorithm for Reliable Broadcast of Periodic Messages in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

A Vehicular Ad-Hoc NETwork (VANET) consists of a set of vehicles moving along roads, which can communicate with each other through ad hoc wireless devices. VANETs have attracted a great deal of attention in the research community in recent years, with the main focus being on their safety applications. One of the major challenges of vehicular networks is designing an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol which can cope with the hidden node problem, the high speed of the nodes, the frequent changes in topology, the lack of an infrastructure, and various QoS requirements. Motivated by this observation, we present a fully distributed and location-based TDMA scheduling scheme for VANETs, named DTMAC. The main goal of this work is to propose a MAC protocol that can provide a reliable broadcast service with bounded access delay, while reducing access collisions and merging collisions with various vehicle densities without having to use expensive and complex spectrum mechanisms such as CDMA or OFDMA. An analytical model of the average access collision probability has been derived, which can be used to evaluate the performance of DTMAC and validate the simulation results under different traffic conditions. The simulation results reveal that DTMAC significantly outperforms VeMAC in terms of transmission collisions and broadcast coverage.