ResVMAC: A Novel Medium Access Control Protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Efficient medium access control (MAC) is a key part of any wireless network communication architecture. MAC protocols are needed for nodes to access the shared wireless medium efficiently. Vehicular Ad hoc networks (VANETs) are an emerging network technology on the verge of large-scale deployment. The dynamic network topologies in VANETs caused by high mobility rates of vehicles presents a great challenge in reliable data transfer. A MAC protocol that enables quick reservation of packet transmission slots by vehicles that wish to send packets is crucial in addressing this challenge. In this paper, we propose a new distributed MAC algorithm ResVMAC for VANETs. We demonstrate using simulations, that our algorithm outperforms two state-of-the-art algorithms in key performance metrics.