DTB-MAC: Dynamic Token-Based MAC Protocol for reliable and efficient beacon broadcasting in VANETs

Most applications developed for vehicular environments rely on broadcasting as the main mechanism to disseminate their messages. However, in IEEE 802.11p, which is the most widely accepted Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for vehicular communications, all transmissions remain unacknowledged if broadcasting is used. Furthermore, safety message transmission requires a strict delay limit and a high reliability, which is an issue for random access MAC protocols like IEEE 802.11p. Therefore, transmission reliability becomes the most important issue for broadcast-based services in vehicular environments. In this paper, we propose a hybrid MAC protocol, referred as Dynamic Token-Based MAC Protocol (DTB-MAC). DTB-MAC uses both a token passing mechanism and a random access MAC protocol to prevent channel contention as much as possible, and to improve the reliability of safety message transmissions. Our proposed protocol tries to select the best neighbouring node as the next transmitter, and when it is not possible, or when it causes a high overhead, the random access MAC protocol is used instead. Based on simulation experiments, we show that the DTB-MAC protocol can achieve better performance compared with IEEE 802.11p in terms of channel utilization and beacon delivery ratio.