On Cooperative and Opportunistic Channel Access for Vehicle to Roadside (V2R) Communications

This paper focuses on vehicle to roadside unit (V2R) communications in vehicle networks based on IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC protocol. The main challenge is due to the short residence time of the moving vehicle within the coverage of each stationary RSU. As a result, the contentions among vehicles during this short period of time dramatically degrade the system performance. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism called Proxy-based Vehicles to RSU access (PVR) for V2R communications. This protocol is designed to exploit collaborative and opportunistic forwarding between any two spaced apart RSUs and to emulate back-to-back transmissions within the coverage of RSU. We then conduct ns-2 simulations to evaluate the performance of PVR. The results show that it achieves excellent performance and outperforms all existing solutions for V2R communications.