Vehicle-Density-Based Adaptive MAC for High Throughput in Drive-Thru Networks

Drive-thru Internet has become a popular solution vehicular Internet access. However, the quality-of-service provisioning for high-data-rate drive-thru Internet services poses significant challenges upon medium access control (MAC) in a large-scale and highly dynamic vehicular environment. In this paper, to achieve high throughput in drive-thru Internet, we exploit the mobility interdependency between neighboring vehicles and propose a density-adaptive MAC protocol by predicting the vehicle-density dynamics. Specifically, to predict the vehicle-density fluctuations in the drive-thru Internet scenario, we leverage Navier-Stokes equations to characterize the mobility interdependence and the dynamically waving vehicle-density which can be observed from the simulated vehicle traces in VISSIM. In tune with the dynamic vehicle-density, we propose an enhanced MAC protocol to dynamically adjust the contention window (CW) setting in order to improve the throughput. Extensive simulations validate the effectiveness of the utilized mobility model, and demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed MAC protocol in improving the overall resultant system throughput.