Analysis and Design of a MAC Protocol and Vehicular Traffic Simulator for Multimedia Communication on Motorways

This paper aims to guarantee the quality of service (QoS) to motorway drivers with regard to multimedia (triple play-video, voice, and data) communications, which requires substantial analysis of the characteristics of vehicular traffic profiles on motorways. We therefore perform an analysis of real vehicular traffic data taken from inductive loops on a motorway and then develop our own simulator to study real-time vehicular traffic scenarios on the medium access control (MAC) layer, where a wireless local area network (WLAN) base station (BS) is responsible for multimedia communication between vehicles and the backbone network. Access to this BS is managed by a modified version of the packet-reservation multiple access (M-PRMA) protocol, which we have integrated into the simulator. Finally, we use our developed simulator, which is built upon extensive analysis of vehicular traffic data, to evaluate the multimedia services offered to motorway drivers.