A New MAC Mechanism for Priority Differentiation in Multi-hop IVC Networks

Inter-vehicle communication (IVC) technique is getting increasing attention. Inspired by cross-layer design, receiver-initiated MAC and fragment burst of IEEE 802.11, a new MAC protocol supporting priority differentiation for IVC based on IEEE 802.11 is proposed in this paper. With this approach, top priority applications can be relayed from source car to destination with minimum contentions, redundant overhead such as require-to-send (RTS) and distributed inter-fame space (DIES) is also retrenched. Another new term named relay-interruption can introduce more contention for lower priority applications and traditional IEEE 802.11 four-way frame exchange is applied for lowest priority traffic. Simulation demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed approach