A Multi-hop MAC Forwarding Protocol for Inter-vehicular Communication

Conventional topology-based routing protocols such as AODV, DSR and ZRP are not suitable for inter-vehicular communication, where the duration of communication lasts extremely shortly. This paper presents a new intervehicular communication protocol called the Multi-hop MAC Forwarding Protocol (MMFP). The MMFP avoids explicit path setup in order to reduce the control overhead associated with it, but instead uses the reachability information towards the destination at each hop. Next-hop nodes are determined on-the-fly by contention based on a priority value. The basic operations of the MMFP are conceptually similar to that of MAC bridges and position-based ad-hoc routing protocols. The MMFP is designed to be integrated with the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol in order to achieve higher efficiency and accuracy in its time-critical operations. It is shown through simulations that the MMFP outperforms the AODV in a realistic inter-vehicular communication scenario in terms of both the end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio.