CoMACAV: Cooperative MAC Protocol for Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

In this paper, a novel cooperative ad hoc medium access control (MAC) protocol is proposed for autonomous vehicles (AVs) referred to as CoMACAV. Three data transmission modes have been offered to increase the throughput which are direct transmission (DT), cooperative relaying (CR) and multi-hop relaying (MHR). The IEEE 802.11 standard defined mechanism only for direct communication which is not suitable for cooperative communication. Therefore, new control packets are introduced, and format of existing control packets is modified for cooperative communication. An analytical model based on the Markov chain model is presented. Simulation results show that the proposed CoMACAV protocol increases throughput.