TAR channel access mechanism for VANET safety-critical situations

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is among the most relevant forms of mobile ad-hoc networks. VANET helps improving traffic safety and efficiency. By exchanging information between each others, vehicles can warn drivers or even prepare for dangerous situation. These warnings can be about critical situations like vehicles merging in a highway. Detecting and warning about such situations require a reliable communication between vehicles increasing thus the need for an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol. In this paper, we propose to apply Transmit And Reserve (TAR), an ad-hoc medium access protocol, to vehicular communications. We integrated TAR into NS-3 simulator and evaluated its performance compared to IEEE 802.11 DCF in a vehicular network context. The evaluation results show that TAR is an efficient medium access protocol for VANET critical situations as it increases the throughput reduces the medium access delays and provides close to optimal short term fairness.