Periodic Broadcast Type Timing Reservation MAC Protocol for Inter-Vehicle Communications

The present study investigates a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for reliable inter-vehicle communications (IVC) to support safe driving with the goal of reducing road traffic accidents. A number of studies have evaluated the performance of the Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol. However, the communication quality provided by the CSMA/CA protocol is degraded seriously by the hidden terminal problem in IVC. Therefore, we propose a new MAC protocol, referred to as Periodic Broadcast-Timing Reservation Multiple Access (PB-TRMA), which can autonomously control transmission timing and avoid packet collisions by enhancing the Network Allocation Vector (NAV) for periodic broadcast communications. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol can resolve the hidden terminal problem and mitigate data packet collisions. Moreover, the behavior of PB-TRMA is similar to that of Time-Division Multiple Access (TDMA).