Distributed location-assisted multiple access scheme for vehicular ad hoc networks

This paper proposes a location-assisted random medium access control (MAC) scheme for distributed vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Consider a vehicular network with a wireless bandwidth of M orthogonal channels that shared by multiple vehicles. Efficient distributed channel access mechanism should be used to improve the bandwidth utilization. We observe that each vehicle has a unique location, which could be exploited as a key information to identify its access channel. Motivated by this observation, we design a location-to-channel (L2C) randomized mapping approach. In the approach, each vehicle will access to the channels with optimal location-dependent probabilities. The simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of this MAC scheme by comparing it to the general random MAC scheme. It is shown that the average collision probability of channel access is clearly reduced and the average throughput of the channel is significantly enhanced.