Design and Analysis of a MAC Protocol for Vehicle to Roadside Networks

This paper presents a new protocol for vehicle to roadside networks and presents an analysis of the handoff related overhead of general MAC protocols for these scenarios. The proposed protocol´s features include the elimination of hidden nodes, prioritized and fast handoff, fairness among nodes and optimal choice of backoff parameters. The analysis presented in the paper derives an information theoretic lower bound on the MAC layer overhead associated with node reassociations. Simulation results are used to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed protocol in comparison to existing protocols.