An Adaptive Multi-Channel Assignment and Coordination Scheme for IEEE 802.11P/1609.4 in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have been developed to provide safety-related and commercial service applications on the road. The IEEE 1609.4 is a standard (legacy) designed to support multi-channels in VANETs, namely control channel (CCH) and service channels (SCHs) with fixed alternating CCH and SCH intervals. The CCH is dedicated to broadcast safety and control applications while SCHs are used to transfer service data applications. However, due to the nature of contention-based channel access scheme and the transmission of multiple applications over the CCH during a fixed interval, safety applications performance is degraded during CCH congestion in high network density scenarios. In this paper, we propose an adaptive multi-channel assignment and coordination (AMAC) scheme for the IEEE 802.11p/1609.4 in VANETs which exploits channel access scheduling and channel switching in a novel way. AMAC scheme includes an adaptive execution of the peer-to-peer negotiation phase between service providers and users for SCH resource reservations, and collision-aware packet transmission mechanisms. These two mechanisms alleviate collisions and increase packet delivery ratio (PDR) of safety applications on the CCH. Thereby, the AMAC scheme ensures an efficient and reliable quality of service (QoS) for different traffic flows and improves the time diversity among vehicles based on the traffic conditions. For performance analysis, analytical models are developed based on 1-D and 2-D Markov chain models taking into account an error-prone channels. The probabilities of successful transmission and collisions have been derived to compute PDR, and delay for safety packets in legacy standard and AMAC scheme. Analytical and simulation results indicate that the AMAC scheme reduces the collisions and increases the PDR for safety applications over the CCH compared with the legacy standard. In addition, AMAC scheme outperforms the legacy standard in terms of system throughput of service applications.