A Novel Coordinated Medium Access Control Scheme for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks in Multichannel Environment

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) aim to provide efficient safety and infotainment services. Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE), which is a standard designed specifically for VANETs, stipulates seven 10-MHz channels: one control channel (CCH) for safety message transmission and six service channels (SCHs) for service message transmission. However, providing reliable broadcasting of safety messages on the CCH and efficient coordination of vehicles for service message transmission across the multiple SCHs in highly dynamic VANET environment is a nontrivial problem. In this paper, we propose a coordinated, adaptive, and reliable multichannel medium-access control scheme for the VANETs (VCAR-MAC). In VCAR-MAC, a novel time-division multiple access (TDMA)-based scheme that considers real-world environmental conditions is proposed to identify every vehicle quickly so that a time slot on the CCH can be allocated efficiently for reliable safety message transmission. On the SCHs, VCAR-MAC provides a multi-SCH coordination scheme, which adaptively adjusts the SCH reservation period in order to fully utilize the channel bandwidth. Furthermore, a dynamic contention window (CW) mechanism is proposed, in which the initial CW size is adaptively optimized to maximize the number of successful SCH reservations, thereby maximizing the service message throughput. It has been proven via the mathematical analysis and simulation experiment that VCAR-MAC can significantly improve throughput and reduce delay for both safety and service messages.