Co-DDTMA: Cooperative Distributed TDMA for Vehicular Networks

Abstract

In recent years, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) has experienced a rapid development due to the advancement of wireless communication technologies, and now emerges as a promising way to provide road safety, traffic efficiency and infotainment applications. However, it is a challenge to design a reliable and efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for VANET due to its frequent topology changes and unreliable wireless links. Cooperative communication, on the other hand, can enhance the reliability of wireless links by exploiting the broadcast nature of the wireless communication. A cooperative scheme for MAC is proposed for VANET in this paper, referred to as Cooperative Distributed TDMA (Co-DTDMA). In the Co-DTDMA, neighboring nodes utilize its idle slots for cooperatively retransmitting a packet which has failed to reach the destination. Since the cooperative retransmission is conducted in node's own idle slot, the proposed scheme does not interrupt the normal transmission. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme greatly increases the probability of successful packet transmission and decreases the packet transmission delay.