On the Ability of the 802.11p MAC Method and STDMA to Support Real-Time Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication

Traffic safety applications using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is an emerging and promising area within the intelligent transportation systems (ITS) sphere. Many of these new applications require real-time communication with high reliability, meaning that packets must be successfully delivered before a certain deadline. Applications with early deadlines are expected to require direct V2V communications, and the only standard currently supporting this is the upcoming IEEE 802.11p, included in the wireless access in vehicular environment (WAVE) stack. To meet a real-time deadline, timely and predictable access to the channel is paramount. However, the medium access method used in 802.11p, carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), does not guarantee channel access before a finite deadline. In this paper, we analyze the communication requirements introduced by traffic safety applications, namely, low delay, reliable, real-time communications. We show by simulation of a simple, but realistic, highway scenario, that vehicles using CSMA/CA can experience unacceptable channel access delays and, therefore, 802.11p does not support real-time communications. In addition, we present a potential remedy for this problem, namely, the use of self-organizing time division multiple access (STDMA). The real-time properties of STDMA are investigated by means of the same highway simulation scenario, with promising results.