An Adaptive Multi-Channel MAC Protocol with Dynamic Interval Division in Vehicular Environment

High throughput performance of the Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) system can provide more capacity for future high density traffic, which is little considered in the ongoing IEEE 802.11p/P1609.4 defined WAVE Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel multi-channel MAC protocol that can use a dynamic time boundary instead of fixed boundary to separate Control Channel (CCH) Interval and Service Channel (SCH) Interval. In our scheme, CCH Interval is further split into Service Announcement Phrase (SAP), Beacon Phrase (BP) and Peer-to-peer Reservation Phrase (PRP), meanwhile a distributed algorithm based on several dynamic parameters is employed to calculate the duration of low-priority PRP according to the real-time traffic load in every Synchronization Interval. The simulation results show that our protocol out-performs the WAVE MAC protocol in different traffic load.