A structured TDMA-based V2I MAC protocol for automated guided vehicle control systems

Recently, IEEE 802.11p based vehicular communication has been widely studied in different area of vehicular applications. In this paper, we mainly focus on the automated guided vehicle (AGV) applications which have a strict communication requirement for very low transmission delay and very high reliability. However, CSMA-based 802.11p standard has problems with unbounded channel access delay and multiple consecutive packet losses due to random access the channel without any control. With this motivation, this paper proposes a novel TDMA-based MAC protocol in order to deliver the vehicle control information with high reliability and bounded latency to satisfy the proposed V2I based AGV system. The proposed TDMA-based MAC protocol is evaluated in comparison with the IEEE 802.11p, i.e., WAVE standard. Simulation results show that the proposed MAC protocol is performed better than IEEE 802.11p in terms of end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio in desired vehicular applications.