LMA: Location- and mobility-aware medium-access control protocols for vehicular ad hoc networks using directional antennas

Abstract

In recent years, the incorporation of the directional antennas within mobile devices has been studied in many areas. The usage of directional antennas can greatly reduce the radio interference, which results in improved utilization of the wireless medium. It becomes practical to exploit the directional antennas in the medium-access control (MAC) protocol design. In this paper, a location- and mobility-aware (LMA) MAC protocol is developed for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). The predictive location and mobility of the vehicles are adopted to provide robust communication links while using the directional beams. The deafness problem is also alleviated using the directional-listen mechanism in the proposed algorithm. Moreover, the exploitation of the directional beacons within the scheme can enhance the reliability of the communication linkages, even when the moving directions and speeds of the vehicles have been changed. Under dynamic moving scenarios, both the spatial reuse and the routing efficiency are preserved using the proposed LMA MAC scheme. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated and compared with other existing MAC protocols in simulations.