A location-based MAC protocol for safety-of-life vehicle-to-vehicle communication

Abstract

Safety of life applications have high importance in today’s traffic as current statistics show. In particular active safety applications are in the center of research activities, focussing on vehicle to vehicle communications as it is easier and cheaper to deploy as well as more effective in most situations. This approach has also to be followed for railway traffic. Though, different vehicle types have different characteristics and therefore different requirements to their communication systems and the communication networks in particular. We identified here the need for an adapted Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol, called Cell-based Orientation-aware MANET Broadcast (COMB) protocol, that fulfills the requirements of the train specific scenario and overcomes the drawbacks of all existing approaches. COMB is based on localization aware cross layer dimensioned CDMA cells, and uses the SOTDMA protocol as intra cell scheme, while the inter cell scheme relies on direction and speed awareness. Like that it can cope with the trains’ speed and their need for a robust communication.