Poster: Implementing deterministic vehicular communications: Rationale and challenges

The medium access is regarded as being one of the most challenging issues to solve in order to provide deterministic wireless communications in vehicular networks. Standard protocols have been shown to fail in addressing this issue and some possible solutions are being proposed, but despite the difficulty of correctly modeling the channel dynamics, most work on Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for real-time vehicular communications has been performed under simulated environments. This poster presents an overview of MAC mechanisms capable of providing deterministic vehicular communications and assesses the requirements a communications device must include in order to allow the implementation of these mechanisms. It also proposes a flexible hardware architecture providing enhanced support to MAC real-time mechanisms, thus promoting the development of novel deterministic MAC protocols.