MV-MAX: Improving Wireless Infrastructure Access for MultiVehicular Communication

When a roadside 802.11-based wireless access point is shared by more than one vehicle, the vehicle with the lowest trans-mission rate reduces the effective transmission rate of all other vehicles. This performance anomaly [9] degrades both individual and overall throughput in such multi-vehicular environments. Observing that every vehicle eventually re-ceives good performance when it is near the access point, we propose MV-MAX (Multi-Vehicular Maximum), a medium access protocol that opportunistically grants wireless access to vehicles with the maximum transmission rate. Mathe-matical analysis and trace-driven simulations based on real data show that MV-MAX not only improves overall system throughput, compared to 802.11, by a factor of almost 4, but also improves on the previously proposed time-fairness scheme [20, 22, 15] by a factor of more than 2. Moreover, de-spite being less fair than 802.11, almost every vehicle bene-fits by using MV-MAX over the more equitable 802.11 access mechanism. Finally, we show that our results are consistent across different data sets