CAH-MAC: Cooperative ADHOC MAC for Vehicular Networks

Due to the rapid advancement in the wireless communication technology and automotive industries, the paradigm of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) emerges as a promising approach to provide road safety, vehicle traffic management, and infotainment applications. Cooperative communication, on the other hand, can enhance the reliability of communication links in VANETs, thus mitigating wireless channel impairments due to the user mobility. In this paper, we present a cooperative scheme for medium access control (MAC) in VANETs, referred to as Cooperative ADHOC MAC (CAH-MAC). In CAH-MAC, neighboring nodes cooperate by utilizing unreserved time slots, for retransmission of a packet which failed to reach the target receiver due to a poor channel condition. Through mathematical analysis and simulation, we show that our scheme increases the probability of successful packet transmission and hence the network throughput in various networking scenarios.