Abstract
With the exponential growth in technologies for the vehicular Internet of things applications and high demands for autonomous road vehicles, future transportation systems are projected to be revolutionized on a global scale. This new landscape requires a stable, flexible, and business-friendly base of connectivity, networking, and computing technology, in which Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can play an important role. A UAV-enabled Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) can provide a cost-effective communication solution to improve the safety and efficiency of the transportation system, particularly if the data traffic is nonhomogeneous and nonstationary. Typically, wireless is the communication medium between vehicles and UAVs in an ITS setting, which is based on the IEEE802.11p MAC protocol adopted by car manufactures. However, the IEEE 802.11p MAC protocol is modified solely for omnidirectional antennas, which restricts network coverage, delay, and throughput. In comparison, the directional antenna has greater network coverage, spatial reuse, and bandwidth. In addition, a multiaccess edge computing (MEC) facility at the backhaul link will provide ultralow latency and high bandwidth services to meet the increasingly growing demand for latency-sensitive vehicle applications such as vehicular video data analytics, autonomous driving, and intelligent navigation. Therefore, this article aims to propose a novel dual-mode MAC protocol that can work in two antenna modes, i.e., directional and omnidirectional. For modeling and simulation purposes, we use the Optimized Network Engineering Tool (OPNET) and aim to seek an evaluation with respect to throughput, media access delay, and retransmission attempts. The results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.