An Adaptive High-Throughput Multichannel MAC Protocol for VANETs

IEEE 802.11p standard, operating over the 75-MHz spectrum at 5.9-GHz band with one control channel (CCH) and six service channels (SCHs), has been poised to provide V2X services over vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). However, due to the absence of central coordinator and the nature of high vehicular mobility, it is difficult to achieve reliable multichannel coordination and adaptive resource reservation to make full use of SCHs, resulting in dramatic throughput degradation. To mitigate this, in this article, we propose an adaptive high-throughput multichannel medium access control (MAC) protocol, namely, AHT-MAC, which can effectively handle the data transmissions over SCHs. With AHT-MAC, the data transmission range (TR) is adjusted according to the beacon TR over the CCH so that a transmitting node can determine proper communication candidates and prepare available resources for both communication nodes before transmissions. Moreover, the communication coordination is done through a two-way handshake. During the handshake, adaptive resource reservation is realized following the proposed resource sharing mechanism, where nodes first utilize as much resource as possible and then share them with others proactively. To increase the success probability of the communication handshake, a request conflict resolution mechanism is also designed to nullify improper handshakes. Therefore, AHT-MAC can reduce the resource wastage due to handshake failures and extra overheads for retransmission requests. Our performance analysis shows that AHT-MAC can significantly improve the system throughput and reduce the channel access period.