A Quality of Service Model for IEEE 802.11p Communication Protocol in a Smart City

A reliable and time-efficient communication system between vehicles and infrastructure is an indispensable issue in the development of a smart city. The vehicles must have the ability to transmit and receive urgent messages with low latency. Infrastructures such as hospitals and police stations should be equipped with base stations capable of communicating in near real-time fashion with vehicles. In addition to that, in a smart grid scenario, this is especially important between the power charging station and the Electric Vehicles (EVs). Nowadays the best standard that is designed to operate in a vehicular environment is the IEEE 802.11p standard. It is a contention-based Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol that provides Quality of Service (QoS) for Wireless Access in the Vehicular Environment (WAVE). In this paper we propose a low-latency version of this protocol by introducing a finite buffer at the MAC level that momentarily stocks the packets coming from the application layer. Our proposed architecture is modeled with a Markov chain analytical method. Our results show an enhancement in the performance in terms of the end-to-end delay and an improvement in the throughput.