A distributed reliable multi-channel MAC protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular wireless communication should be able to provide vehicles reliable and efficient data transmission for various especially safety applications. The multi-channel medium access control (MAC) mechanism is used to enhance the system performance. However, the current version of multi-channel MAC protocol based on IEEE1609.4 and IEEE802.11p is not fully applicable in vehicular environment. In this paper we present a distributed reliable multi-channel MAC architecture, which is specifically designed to provide distributed contention-free channel access, reliable packets delivery and efficient broadcast service. In addition to defining implementation details of our proposed protocol, we also conduct simulation evaluations and the results show that our proposed scheme performs better on critical statistics we are concerned.