Improving Scalability of Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication with Prediction-Based STDMA

Self-organized TDMA (STDMA) has been proposed as a medium access control (MAC) protocol for Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication. Although it avoids the unbounded channel access delay faced by other CSMA-based protocols, the reliability in high traffic density is still unsatisfactory for critical road safety applications. This paper introduces an enhanced prediction-based STDMA protocol which utilizes the spatial information available in the messages exchanged for road safety applications. Thus it allocates the radio resources more efficiently and minimizes the mutual interference among different vehicles. The results show that the prediction-based STDMA offers a significant improvement in the scalability and coverage of the V2V communication system for road safety applications with strict reliability requirement. The performance enhancement of the proposed MAC protocol is achieved without adding much complexity to the existing STDMA and it has considerable potential for further improvement.