Scalability Issues of the MAC Methods STDMA and CSMA of IEEE 802.11p When Used in VANETs

Position messages will be the foundation for many emerging traffic safety applications based on wireless communications. These messages contain information about the vehicle's position, speed, direction, etc. and are broadcasted periodically by each vehicle. The upcoming IEEE 802.11p standard, intended for vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs) has flaws caused by the unpredictable behavior of its medium access control (MAC) scheme, which imply that traffic safety applications cannot be supported satisfactorily when the network load increases. We study the MAC mechanism within IEEE 802.11p being a carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) algorithm and compare it with a self-organizing time division multiple access (STDMA) scheme when used for broadcasting periodic position messages in a realistic highway scenario. We investigate their scalability in terms of the number of vehicles that the VANET can support using metrics such as channel access delay, probability of concurrent transmissions and interference distance. The results show that STDMA outperforms CSMA of 802.11p even when the network is not saturated.