TCGMAC: A TDMA‐based MAC protocol with collision alleviation based on slot declaration and game theory in VANETS

Abstract

Abstract Recently, there has been increasing interest in intelligent transport systems and intelligent connected vehicles. Vehicular ad hoc networks play an important role in these areas. Many time‐division multiple access (TDMA)–based protocols have been proposed to obtain lower transmission delay and packet loss rate. However, transmission collisions occur when nodes that belong to the same two‐hop set use the same time slot in TDMA‐based protocols. Meanwhile, nodes reacquire slots because of the packet loss caused by poor channel conditions, which further lowers the protocol's performance. In this paper, we study TCGMAC, a combined TDMA and carrier‐sense multiple access (CSMA) medium access control (MAC)–layer protocol. Each time frame is divided into two parts: the TDMA period (TP) and the CSMA period (CP). TP is used for application data transmission, and CP is used for the slot requirement. If two or more nodes acquire the same time slot in the CP, game theory is used to improve the slot allocation efficiency. The simulation results demonstrate that TCGMAC performs well in different traffic densities and channel conditions.