Reducing channel contention in vehicular environments through an adaptive contention window solution

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are attracting growing attention both in industry and academia due to the advances in wireless communication technologies, and a significant demand for a wide variety of applications targeting this kind of environments are expected. In order to make it usable in real vehicular environments, achieving a well-designed Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is a challenging issue due to the dynamic nature of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), scalability issues, and the variety of application requirements. Different standardization organizations have selected IEEE 802.11 as the first choice for VANET environments considering its availability, maturity, and cost. The contention window is a critical parameter for handling medium access collisions by the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, and it highly affects the communications performance. The impact of adjusting the contention window has been studied in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs), but the vehicular communications community has not yet addressed this issue thoroughly. This paper proposes a new contention window control scheme, called DBM-ACW, for VANET environments. Analysis and simulation results using OMNeT++ in a highway scenario show that DBM-ACW provides better overall performance compared with previous proposals, even with high network densities.