Medium Access Control for QoS Provisioning in Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Communication Networks

The emerging vehicular networks are targeted to provide efficient communications between mobile vehicles and fixed roadside units (RSU), and support mobile multimedia applications and safety services with diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we propose a busy tone based medium access control (MAC) protocol with enhanced QoS provisioning for life critical safety services. By using busy tone signals for efficient channel preemption in both contention period (CP) and contention free period (CFP), emergency users can access the wireless channel with strict priority when they compete with multimedia users, and thus achieve the minimal Part of this paper was presented at the 6th International ICST Conference on Communications and Networking in China (Chinacom 2011). This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61101121), in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China, and in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Y. Bi (B) · H. Zhao College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, 110819, China e-mail: [email protected] H. Zhao e-mail: [email protected] L. X. Cai Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA e-mail: [email protected] X. (Sherman) Shen Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada e-mail: [email protected] access delay. Furthermore, through efficient transmission coordination on the busy tone channel, contention level can be effectively reduced, and the overall network resource utilization can be improved accordingly. We then develop an analytical model to quantify the medium access delay of emergency messages. Extensive simulations with Network Simulator (NS)-2 validate the analysis and demonstrate that the proposed MAC can guarantee reliable and timely emergency message dissemination in a vehicular network.