PC-MAC: pico cellular MAC protocol for motorway vehicular multimedia communication (extended version)

摘要

Due to the dynamic nature of vehicular networks, provisioning multimedia (triple play-video, voice and data) communications to motorway drivers with quality of service (QoS) is extremely challenging. To overcome the challenges in this scenario, substantial effort is required to analyse the characteristics of vehicular traffic profiles on motorways around a base station (BS). For this purpose, we first perform detailed analysis of real vehicular traffic data taken from inductive loops on a motorway, and then develop our own vehicular simulator to study real-time vehicular traffic scenarios where a main BS is responsible for multimedia communication. To address the issue of maintaining QoS for different traffic classes in reservation-based medium access control (MAC) protocols in high-speed vehicles, a novel medium access control, PC-MAC (pico cellular medium access control) protocol is introduced. The proposed PC-MAC protocol is a combination of carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) and slotted time division multiple access (S-TDMA) for multimedia communication with optimal utilization for a motorway environment. Finally, the access to the BS is managed by our proposed PC-MAC protocol that we have integrated into the vehicular simulator. The results of this configuration have been compared with other protocols.