Joint MAC and Network Layer Control for VANET Broadcast Communications Considering End-to-End Latency

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), multi-hop broadcast communications are required for many applications including driver assistance systems. However, providing a low end-to-end latency has been very challenging. In this paper, we propose a joint MAC network layer multi-hop broadcast protocol. For the network layer, the proposed protocol reduces the number of sender nodes by using common forwarder nodes for different traffic flows. At the MAC layer, the proposed protocol uses a Q-Learning algorithm to adjust the contention window size. By interacting with the environment, the protocol can find the best contention window size to transmit data packets and therefore can provide a high packet dissemination ratio and low end-to-end delay for various scenarios. The simulation results demonstrate the advantage of the proposed protocol over other existing alternatives.