On the enhancements to IEEE 802.11 MAC and their suitability for safety-critical applications in VANET

摘要

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) or inter-vehicle communication (IVC) provides many brand new and powerful capabilities for transportation system applications. Safety massaging, as one of the capabilities, supports many potential safety applications such as emergency electronic brake lights, lane change warning, pre-crash warning. These applications require a low latency and high reliability communication service. In this paper, we first analyze these critical requirements. The under-development 802.11p for VANET is then discussed with respect to those requirements. An extensive research on the enhancements for 802.11 media access control (MAC) is conducted in order to show their suitability for safety applications. As a conclusion, a realistically feasible MAC enhancement scheme is still needed to achieve the high performance requirements and the compatibility.