A Multi-Channel Token Ring Protocol for Inter-Vehicle Communications

This paper proposes a multi-channel token ring protocol (MCTRP) for inter-vehicle communications (IVC). With MCTRP, the emergency messages can be quickly disseminated with bounded delay, and the desired quality-of-service (QoS) for multimedia traffic can be provided with limited hardware requirement and signaling cost. In addition, MCTRP ensures that all nodes have an equal opportunity to transmit their data to achieve fairness. Through extensive simulations, it is demonstrated that MCTRP can effectively meet the requirements of IVC.