A reliable multi-hop safety message broadcast in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) should provide the reliable safety message broadcasts and the efficient non-safety message transmissions to vehicles. The IEEE 1609.4 MAC, which supports multi-channel operations in VANETs, is not reliable enough for the safety message broadcast and not efficient in the Service CHannel (SCH) resources utilization. In this paper, we propose a MAC protocol which supports a Reliable Multi-hop Safety message Broadcast (RMSB-MAC) in VANETs. Each Multi-hop Forwarder (MF) collects the safety messages from the neighbor vehicle nodes, and then the MF uses its reserved time slot to broadcast them to all vehicle nodes in its transmission range as well as to forward them to the next MF. Moreover, by allowing vehicle nodes to exchange non-safety messages during the Control CHannel Interval (CCHI), the RMSB-MAC utilizes the SCH resources more efficiently.