About Deterministic and non-Deterministic Vehicular Communications over DSRC/802.11p

In this work, we introduce a priority-aware deterministic access protocol called Vehicular Deterministic Access (VDA). VDA is based on 802.11p/DSRC and allows vehicles to access the shared medium in collision-free periods. Particularly, VDA supports two types of safety services (emergency and routine safety messages) with different priorities and strict requirements on delay. To avoid long delays and high packet collisions, VDA allows vehicles to access the wireless medium at selected times with a lower contention than would otherwise be possible within a two-hop neighborhood by the classical 802.11p Enhanced Distributed Channel Access or Distributed Coordination Function schemes. A non-VDA-enabled vehicle, that is, a vehicle not configured with the optional VDA capability over 802.11p, may start transmitting on the shared channel just before or during the VDA opportunities reserved for vehicles with VDA capabilities. To avoid the aforementioned issues and prevent interfering transmissions from VDA-enabled vehicles and non-VDA-enabled vehicles, we also proposed a novel scheme called extended VDA. We analyzed the impact of several design tradeoffs between the contention free period/contention period dwell time ratios on the performance of safety applications with different priorities for VDA and extended VDA. Simulations show that the proposed schemes clearly outperform the backoff-based schemes currently used by 802.11p in high communication density conditions while bounding the transmission delay of safety messages and increasing the packet reception rate. Copyright (c) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.