Dynamically adjusting the min-max contention window for providing quality of service in vehicular networks

This paper proposes a novel, intelligent medium access control mechanism for vehicular ad hoc networks. In particular, the minimum and maximum contention window parameters are dynamically tuned based on network observations, concerning all applications´ access categories. The simple, generic, and efficient nonlinear control law built, is based on fuzzy logic control and although we focus on vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication, the proposed scheme can be easily adapted for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. We demonstrate, via simulative evaluation of dense and dynamic conditions, that the proposed scheme offers enhanced differentiation among different applications´ access categories; therefore, offering sufficient Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of throughput performance, in contrast with the IEEE 802.11p standard MAC protocol we compared against.