Citation

Ito K, Suzuki N, Makido S, Hayashi H. Inform. Media Technol. 2011; 6(2): 621-632.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Information and Media Technologies Editorial Board)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The present study investigates a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for reliable inter-vehicle communications (IVC) to support safe driving with the goal of reducing road traffic accidents. A number of studies have evaluated the performance of the Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol. However, the communication quality provided by the CSMA/CA protocol is seriously degraded by the hidden terminal problem in IVC. Therefore, we propose a new MAC protocol, referred to as Periodic Broadcast-Timing Reservation Multiple Access (PB-TRMA), which can autonomously control transmission timing and avoid packet collisions by enhancing the Network Allocation Vector (NAV) for periodic broadcast communications. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol can resolve the hidden terminal problem and mitigate data packet collisions. Moreover, the behavior of PB-TRMA is similar to that of Time-Division Multiple Access (TDMA). In addition, we show that two procedures, namely, packet collision retrieval and hidden terminal detection, are essential ingredients in PB-TRMA in order to achieve high quality performance.