Agent-Based Coordination Scheme for IEEE 802.11p Wireless Vehicular Networks

Wifeless access in the vehicular environment (WAVE) architecture of intelligent transportation system (ITS) has been standardized in the IEEE 802.11p specification and it is going to be widely deployed in many roadway environments in order to provide prompt emergency information and internet services. A typical WAVE network consists of a number of WAVE devices, in which one is the road-side-unit (RSU) and the others are on-board-units (OBUs), and supports one control channel (CCH) and one or more service channels (SCH) for OBU access. The CCH is used to transport the emergency messages and service information of SCHs and the SCHs could be used to carry internet traffic and non-critical safety traffic of OBUs. However, the IEEE 802.11p contention-based medium access control protocol would suffer degraded transmission efficiency if the number of OBUs contending on an SCH is large. Moreover, synchronizing all WAVE devices to periodically and equally access the CCH and an SCH will waste as much as 50% of the channel resources of the SCH [1]. As a solution, we propose an efficiency-improvement scheme, namely the agent-based coordination (ABC) scheme, which improves the SCH throughput by means of electing one OBU to be the agent to schedule the other OBUs so that they obtain the access opportunities on one SCH and access the other SCH served by RSU in a contention-free manner. Based on the ABC scheme, three different scheduling and/or relaying strategies are further proposed and compared. Numerical results and simulation results confirm that the proposed ABC scheme significantly promotes the standard transmission efficiency.