VeMAC: A TDMA-Based MAC Protocol for Reliable Broadcast in VANETs

The need of a medium access control (MAC) protocol for an efficient broadcast service is of great importance to support the high-priority safety applications in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). This paper introduces VeMAC, a novel multichannel TDMA MAC protocol proposed specifically for a VANET scenario. The VeMAC supports efficient one-hop and multihop broadcast services on the control channel by using implicit acknowledgments and eliminating the hidden terminal problem. The protocol reduces transmission collisions due to node mobility on the control channel by assigning disjoint sets of time slots to vehicles moving in opposite directions and to road side units. Analysis and simulation results in highway and city scenarios are presented to evaluate the performance of VeMAC and compare it with ADHOC MAC, an existing TDMA MAC protocol for VANETs. It is shown that, due to its ability to decrease the rate of transmission collisions, the VeMAC protocol can provide significantly higher throughput on the control channel than ADHOC MAC.