Position-based data traffic prioritization in safety-critical, real-time vehicle-to-infrastructure communication

Future active-safety applications in vehicular networks rely heavily on the support for real-time inter-vehicle communication. The Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism proposed for the upcoming IEEE 802.11p standard intended for Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) applications does not offer deterministic real-time support, i.e., the channel access delay is not upper bounded. We therefore propose a vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication solution extending IEEE 802.11p, by introducing a collision-free MAC phase with an enhanced prioritization mechanism based on vehicle positions and the overall road traffic density. A road side unit using a polling mechanism is then able to provide real-time support such that it can guarantee collision-free channel access within its transmission range. Part of the bandwidth remains unchanged such that best-effort services like ongoing vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) applications may continue. Our solution guarantees that all communication deadlines of the V2I applications are met, while minimizing the required length of the collision-free phase. This in turn maximizes the amount of bandwidth available for best-effort services and ongoing V2V applications. The position-based prioritization mechanism further improves the throughput of both real-time and best-effort data traffic by focusing the communication resources to the most hazardous areas. The concept is evaluated analytically based on a realistic task set from a V2I merge assistance scenario.©2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.Category number CFP0901E; Code78408; Article number 5208065