A Novel Contention-Free Medium Access Control Protocol for Inter-Vehicle Communication Systems

We propose a contention-free medium access control (MAC) protocol for inter-vehicle communication systems that share information for the improvement of safety drive on the highway. In the proposed system, contention-free medium access is achieved by periodical one-way token transmissions. The token contains the frame information about the transmission/reception phase. While the token is relaid by one-way, the vehicle which has the token can send a packet to both up- and down-link. The token transmission interval is set not to be interfered from other transmit vehicles at a receive vehicle. In addition, multiple channels are used and allocated dynamically for every token transmission to reduce the transmission waiting time. We also evaluate the maximum end-to-end transmission delay of the proposed protocol, and clarify that the proposed protocol can guarantee the transmission within allowable delay time.