Summary The beacon transmission method in vehicular networks has to consider the mobility feature of vehicles and use the wireless channel more efficiently in order to broadcast safety‐related beacons with high reliability while respecting strict deadlines. The time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme has been proposed to improve the effectiveness of the IEEE 802.11p CSMA MAC protocol, but it is challenged with access and merging collisions caused by inefficient strategies in allocating time slots and mobile hidden terminal problems. In this paper, we propose colored velocity‐based TDMA (CVTDMA), an original colored scheduling scheme for the broadcast of safety beacons on the control channel. Based on vehicles speed and colors that it assigns to time slots according to their occupation statuses, it mitigates the mobility effect and maximizes the reuse of slots while avoiding collisions. The simulation results show that our protocol uses the wireless channel much more effectively than the default one defined in IEEE 802.11p.

Vehicular safety applications are based on broadcasting periodic safety beacons on the IEE802.11p control channel. The CSMA MAC scheme adopted in the IEE802.11p cannot ensure the strict timeline and the high reliability when broadcasting these real time and critical messages since it does not consider the high mobility of vehicles, the limited network resources, and the variant traffic densities. Therefore, the design of an effective MAC scheme that takes in consideration these parameters represents a challenging task. Furthermore, the fixed beaconing rate results an overload on the commination channel and collisions especially in dense situations that delay beacons broadcast. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid MAC scheme for fast and reliable broadcast of safety beacons. At first, it relies on a time slot reuse policy that considers the mobility features of vehicles while reducing transmission collisions. In addition, it adapts mathematically the beaconing rate to the traffic density based on vehicular velocity at the aim of optimizing the performance of the wireless channel. Simulation results show that our proposal outperforms significantly the IEEE802.11p CSMA MAC scheme and upgrades the performance of vehicular networks in broadcasting periodic safety beacons.