A TDMA-Based Hybrid Transmission MAC Protocol for Heterogeneous Vehicular Network

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is an important part of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). VANETs can realize communication between moving vehicles, infrastructures and other intelligent mobile terminals, which can greatly improve the road safety and traffic efficiency effectively. Existing studies of vehicular ad hoc network usually consider only one data transmission model, while the increasing density of traffic data sources means that the vehicular ad hoc network is evolving into Heterogeneous Vehicular Network (HetVNET) which needs hybrid data transmission scheme. Considering the Heterogeneous Vehicular Network, this paper presents a hybrid transmission MAC protocol including vehicle to vehicle communication (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure communication (V2I/I2V). In this protocol, the data are identified according to timeliness, on the base of the traditional V2V and V2I/I2V communication. If the time-sensitive data (V2V data) fail in transmission, the node transmits the data to the base station and let the base station cooperatively transmit the data with higher priority. This transmission scheme uses the large transmission range of base station in an effective manner. In this paper, the queueing models of the vehicles and base station are analyzed respectively by one-dimensional and two-dimensional Markov Chain, and the expressions of throughput, packet drop rate and delay are also derived. The simulation results show that this MAC protocol can improve the transmission efficiency of V2V communication and reduce the delay of V2V data without losing the system performance.