Performance evaluation of the MAC protocol for integrated inter-vehicle and road to vehicle communications

This paper describes a performance evaluation of the medium access control (MAC) protocol for integrated inter-vehicle communications (IVC) and road to vehicle communications (RVC) called VRCP (Vehicle and Road-side Collaborative MAC Protocol) that achieve the high performance in communications. VRCP can use RVC not only for the access control of IVC but also for the data communication. Computer simulations by the autonomous cruising traffic simulator including the MAC model and shadowing model are carried out to evaluate the performance of the VRCP in realistic traffic conditions. Results of the simulations show the performances of the VRCP in the case of using RVC only for access control of IVC and another case of using RVC for both access control of IVC and data communication. In particular, the VRCP can achieve high performance by using RVC to compensate the data of IVC even in the shadowing conditions, compared to the conventional IVC by contention access scheme.