An autonomous driving environment poses a very stringent requirement for the timely delivery of safety messages in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Time division multiple access (TDMA)-based medium access control (MAC) protocols are considered a promising solution because of their time-bound message delivery. However, in the event of mobility-caused packet collisions, they may experience an unpredicted and extended delay in delivering messages, which can cause catastrophic accidents. To solve this problem, a distributed TDMA-based MAC protocol with mobility-caused collision mitigation (MCCM-MAC) is presented in this paper. The protocol uses a novel mechanism to detect merging collisions and mitigates them by avoiding subsequent access collisions. One vehicle in the merging collisions retains the time slot, and the others release the slot. The common neighboring vehicles can timely suggest a suitable new time slot for the vacating vehicles, which can avoid access collisions between their packet transmissions. A tie-breakup mechanism is employed to avoid further access collisions. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol reduces packet loss more than the existing methods. Consequently, the average delay between the successfully delivered periodic messages is also reduced.
Keywords: medium access control; merging collision mitigation; time division multiple access; time-bounded message delivery; vehicular ad hoc networks.