A WAVE-Compliant MAC Protocol to Support Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Non-Safety Applications

IEEE 802.11p is an emerging standard intended to support wireless access in the vehicular environment and to deliver both safety and non-safety applications to vehicles on the roads. Despite the numerous research works related to the design of reliable and timely dissemination of safety messages among vehicles, only a few works have investigated on-the-road delivery of non-safety data traffic, such as QoS-sensitive comfort and entertainment applications (e.g., multimedia, web browsing, e-mails, e-maps). In this paper, we propose a novel MAC protocol, W-HCF (WAVE-based Hybrid Coordination Function), which targets at the support of non-safety applications in vehicular environments. It is fully compliant with the IEEE 802.11p/WAVE (Wireless Access for Vehicular Environment) operational mode. Simulation results show that W-HCF outperforms the legacy IEEE 802.11p protocol in a vehicle-to-infrastructure communication network, and that it is able to match the requirements of applications in terms of goodput and delay. Index Terms—MAC, EDCA, HCCA, vehicular network, WAVE, QoS