Abstract
In support of traffic safety applications, vehicular networks should offer a robust Medium Access Control (MAC) layer protocol that can provide a reliable delivery service to safety-related messages. As the safety applications generally use broadcasting to propagate their messages, a reliable broadcast protocol is essential. In general, however, broadcast is considered as unreliable by nature in contrast to unicast. This paper introduces a novel MAC protocol, called a Hybrid Cooperative MAC (HCMAC), which can substantially enhance the reliability of broadcast in vehicular networks by employing a notion of channelization. HCMAC introduces a hybrid protocol that combines a time slot allocation of Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) and a random-access technique of Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) and thus minimizes the probability of data collisions. In addition, its feedback strategy further enhances the system performance by preventing transmissions during time slots that experience collisions. Through analysis and simulations, we compare the performance of HCMAC with VeMAC, an existing TDMA protocol. The results demonstrate that HCMAC can offer substantially faster channel access and lower collision rate compared with VeMAC.