A wireless token ring protocol for intelligent transportation systems

Abstract

The wireless token ring protocol (WTRP) is a medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless networks in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). It supports quality of service (QoS) in terms of bounded latency and reserved bandwidth. The WTRP is efficient in the sense that it reduces the number of re-transmissions due to collisions. It is fair in the sense that each station takes a turn to transmit and is forced to give up the right to transmit after transmitting for a specified amount of time. It is a distributed protocol that supports many topologies since not all stations need to be connected to each other or to a central station. It can be used with an admission control agent for bandwidth or latency reservations. The WTRP is robust against single node failure. The WTRP is designed to recover gracefully from multiple simultaneous faults. It has applications to inter-access-point coordination in ITS dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) and to safety-critical vehicle-to-vehicle networking.