RV-MAC: A Reliable MAC Protocol for Multi-hop VANETs

Abstract

With no need for Road Side Unit (RSU), multi-hop Vehicular Ad Hoc NETworks (VANETs) have drawn more and more attention recently. Considering the safety of vehicles, a MediaAccess Control (MAC) protocol for reliable transmission is critical for multi-hop VANETs. Most currentworks need RSU to handle the collisions brought by hidden-terminal problem and the mobility of vehicles. In this paper, we proposed RV-MAC, which is a reliable MAC protocol for multi-hop VANETs based on Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA). First, to address the hidden-terminal under the networks with multi-hop topology, we design a region marking scheme to divide vehicles into different regions. Then a collisions avoidance scheme is proposed to handle the collisions owing to channel competition and the mobility of vehicles. Simulation results show that compared with other protocol, RV-MAC can decrease contention collisions by 30% and encounter collisions by 50% respectively. As a result, RV-MAC achieves higher throughput and lower network delay.