A performance comparison of media access control protocols for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs)
Date
2012-04
Authors
Booysen, Marthinus J.
Zeadally, Sherali
Van Rooyen, Gert-Jan
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET)
Abstract
The emergence of computationally rich vehicles and recent advances in wireless communication technologies are fueling vehicular network research in industry and academia. A key challenge to the successful deployment of vehicular communication is the implementation and efficiency of the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. There are mainly two types of MAC approaches, namely contention-based and contention-free. The current standard, IEEE 802.11p, is a contention-based approach, which has the severe limitation of unbounded transmission delays. An alternative contention-free approach called Dedicated Multichannel MAC (DMMAC) has been proposed in the literature. In this work we analyze these two approaches, discuss their limitations and introduce an improved approach called Medium Access with Memory Bifurcation and Administration (MAMBA). We evaluate the performance of the three approaches in highway and urban scenarios, for both low and high density traffic. Our performance evaluation results show that MAMBA improves throughput and message delivery ratio by up to 150% and 205% over IEEE 802.11p and DMMAC approaches respectively. MAMBA also improves on the latency achieved by the other methods by up to 72% and 99% respectively, compared to IEEE 802.11p and DMMAC.
Description
The original publication is available at www.ietdl.org or http://digital-library.theiet.org/IET-NET.
Keywords
Media access control protocols, Wireless communication technologies, Dedicated Multichannel MAC (DMMAC), IEEE 802.11p, Wireless communication systems, Mobile communication systems
Citation
Booysen, M. J., Zeadally, S. & Van Rooyen, G-J. 2012. A performance comparison of media access control protocols for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), IET Digital library, 1(1), 10-19, doi:10.1049/iet-net.2011.0044.