Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) provide information and entertainment to drivers for safe and enjoyable driving. Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) is designed for VANETs to provide services efficiently. In particular, infotainment services are crucial to leverage market penetration and deployment costs of the WAVE standard. However, a low presence of infrastructure results in a shadow zone on the road and a link disconnection. The link disconnection is an obstacle to providing safety and infotainment services and becomes an obstacle to the deployment of the WAVE standard. In this paper, we propose a cooperative communication protocol to reduce performance degradation due to frequent link disconnection in the road environment. The proposed protocol provides contention-free data delivery by the coordination of roadside units (RSUs) and can provide the network QoS. The proposed protocol is shown to enhance throughput and delay through the simulation.
Keywords: IEEE 802.11p; ITS; IoT; VANET; WAVE; cooperative communication.