Supporting Deterministic Medium Access Control in Wireless Vehicular Communications

The medium access is regarded as being one of the most challenging issues to solve in order to provide de- terministic wireless communications in vehicular networks. It has been demonstrated that standard protocols fail to properly address this issue. The implementation of deterministic Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols is hampered by the fact that commercial devices do not allow modifications to the standard MAC mechanism, and the development of a device from scratch to implement one MAC scheme is an extremely laborious endeavor. However, over the last few years, the IT2S platform for vehicular communications has been developed and is now in a stage that allows implementation and testing of new solutions for the vehicular communications environment. This paper presents an overview of MAC mechanisms capable of providing deterministic real-time access and assesses the features a communications device should include in order to allow the implementation of these mechanisms. It then proposes an implementation of such features taking advantage of the white box access to the IT2S platform, which is not usually available in COTS devices.