A QoS Supported Multi-channel MAC for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The emerging wireless vehicular communication technology is intended to improve safety and comfort of transportation systems. Different types of traffic information could be delivered through vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications. This paper proposes a Quality-of-Service (QoS) supported multi-channel MAC scheme for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), which can adaptively tune the contention window for different services at each node, and dynamically adjust the intervals of the Control Channel (CCH) and the Service Channels (SCHs) working in multi-rate. Theoretical model is proposed to obtain the contention window and optimize the intervals based on traffic conditions. Analysis and simulation results show that the proposed MAC is able to help IEEE 1690.4 MAC support QoS services, while ensuring the high saturation throughput and the prioritized transmission of critical safety information.