Taxanomy and Overview on Cooperative MAC for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Wireless networks are broad area that experiencing rapid growth in this last few decade and can be categorized into two sub-domains. Correspondingly, wireless ad hoc networks is one of the sections in wireless networks, it can be further categorized based on the applications. This paper focuses more on vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) which fall into one of the applications in wireless ad hoc network. Area of interest in VANETs research has been summarized and medium access control (MAC) research area is still wide area to be discovered. VANETs performance metrics also has been outline. Cooperative communication on the other hand is a noted technique to enhance reliability and throughput in wireless systems where the neighboring nodes can do the overhearing. Cooperative MAC protocols do receive much attention from researchers' especially in IEEE 802.11 standard and a summary of related works had been done. A strong relationship between cooperative MAC protocols has been reported in the literature but only a few focuses on vehicular network. Since cooperative communications is a promising technique in improving reliability and throughput in wireless system, this can be implemented for V2V scenario in vehicular networks.