TA- TDMA: A traffic aware TDMA MAC protocol for safety applications in VANET

Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET) is an innovative technology designed to tackle the road safety challenges by providing a communication infrastructure to vehicular environments. Safety-related applications are delay-intolerant and demand low-latency and reliable transmissions of critical data. TDMA mechanism has been proven effective for this type of applications. However, the particular features of the vehicular environment bring challenges to the applicability of TDMA in VANET. The highly dynamic nature of the network increases the likelihood of concurrent access to radio resources. Several studies addressed the access collision issue in TDMA, but they demonstrate weaknesses regarding channel utilization and negotiation overhead. In this paper, we present a traffic-aware TDMA-based (TA- TDMA) protocol which improves the VeMAC protocol to meet the real-time requirements. The proposed solution relies on traffic prediction to assign appropriate resources to each area of the network. To evaluate its validity, TA- TDMA is compared with VeMAC through simulation.