Position-Based Data Traffic Prioritization in Safety-Critical, Real-Time Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Communication

Future active-safety applications in vehicular networks rely heavily on the support for real-time inter-vehicle communication. The Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism proposed for the upcoming IEEE 802.11p standard intended for Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) applications does not offer deterministic real-time support, i.e., the channel access delay is not upper bounded. We therefore propose a vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication solution extending IEEE 802.11p, by introducing a collision-free MAC phase with an enhanced prioritization mechanism based on vehicle positions and the overall road traffic density. A road side unit using a polling mechanism is then able to provide real-time support such that it can guarantee collision-free channel access within its transmission range. Part of the bandwidth remains unchanged such that best-effort services like ongoing vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) applications may continue. Our solution guarantees that all communication deadlines of the V2I applications are met, while minimizing the required length of the collision-free phase. This in turn maximizes the amount of bandwidth available for best-effort services and ongoing V2V applications. The position-based prioritization mechanism further improves the throughput of both real-time and best-effort data traffic by focusing the communication resources to the most hazardous areas. The concept is evaluated analytically based on a realistic task set from a V2I merge assistance scenario.