A Self Reorganizing MAC Protocol for Inter-vehicle Data Transfer Applications in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

This paper presents a novel medium access control protocol for inter-vehicle data transfer applications using the emerging dedicated short range communication (DSRC) standards. The main contributions of the paper are the design of a self-configuring TDMA protocol and its evaluation for inter-vehicle data transfer applications. A novel feature of the proposed VeSOMAC is its in-band control mechanism for exchanging TDMA slot information during distributed MAC scheduling. It is shown that the in-band control mechanism can be used for fast protocol convergence during topology changes due to vehicle movements. Also, simulated performance comparison between VeSOMAC and the DSRC-recommended 802.11 MAC protocol demonstrates that the proposed protocol can accomplish better inter-vehicle file transfer performance through enhanced TCP throughput and fewer MAC layer packet drops compared to 802.11.