CRaSCH: A cooperative scheme for service channel reservation in 802.11p/WAVE vehicular ad hoc networks

IEEE 802.11p is an emerging standard intended to support wireless access in the vehicular environment and to deliver both safety and non-safety applications to vehicles on the roads. Despite the massive research effort related to the design of reliable and timely schemes for dissemination of safety messages, only a few works have investigated on-the-road delivery of non-safety data traffic, such as comfort and entertainment applications (e.g., multimedia, web browsing, e-mails, e-maps), by considering the standard features and capabilities. The IEEE802.11p/WAVE (Wireless Access for Vehicular Environment) standard foresees that safety and control messages are carried over a dedicated control channel, while non safety messages can be delivered over one of a set of available service channels. In this paper, we propose a cooperative reservation scheme for service channels to be carried out by wireless nodes acting as WAVE providers. The proposal is fully compliant with the IEEE802.11p/WAVE standard and supports both V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) and V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle) communications. We expect that the cooperative scheme can outperform the legacy IEEE 802.11p/WAVE protocol, by reducing the cases where two or more providers choose the same service channel for non-safety traffic delivery. This would result in improved system performance without adversely affecting the delivery of safety applications on the control channel.