A MAC layer protocol for real-time inter-vehicle communication

Inter-vehicle communication systems may be required to support real-time communication for a network of vehicles in the absence of a base station. Based on this premise, the paper presents the design of a distributed MAC layer protocol, namely the elimination by sieving (ES-DCF) protocol, that incorporates explicit support for real-time traffic in an ad-hoc wireless network. ES-DCF uses the mechanisms of prioritized collision avoidance and deterministic collision resolution in order to provide timely delivery guarantees to different classes of real-time data traffic. The simulation studies performed confirmed that ES-DCF performs well in minimizing the number of hard-real time packets dropped.