Vehicular Ad hoc Networks, known as VANETs, are deployed to decrease the probability of road accidents and to improve passenger comfort by allowing vehicles to exchange different kinds of data messages between the mobile vehicles and the installed infrastructure. VANETs facilitate improved traffic safety and efficiency. Each vehicle can exchange information to inform other vehicles about the current status of the traffic flow or a dangerous situation such as an accident. Moreover, traffic safety applications need a reliable communication scheme with minimal transmission collision, which leads to the need for an efficient and reliable MAC. Design MAC for VANETs is a complex task due to the high mobility of the nodes, the frequent changes in topology, the lack of an infrastructure, and various QoS requirements. In the past years, various Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based medium access control protocols have been proposed for VANETs in an attempt to assure that all the vehicles have sufficient time to send safety messages with minimum collisions and to reduce the end-to-end delay and the packet loss ratio. In this survey paper a qualitative comparison provided in order to improve the performance of TDMA-based MAC protocols for V2V communication and also focused on the detailed characteristics of these protocols, their benefits and limitations. Keywords: Ad hoc, DSRC, IEEE 802.11p, MAC Protocols, TDMA, QoS, V2V, V2I, VANET.
I. INTRODUCTIONVehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are emerging as a promising technology for providing safety and comfort applications for vehicular transportation. VANETs are receiving growing attention from the research community and from the transportation industry because of their great potential to improve traffic safety on roads. They can also be used to improve traffic management conditions and to provide on-board infotainment such as Internet access, video streaming, etc. VANETs are an example of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) but with their own specification: high node mobility with constrained movements and the mobile nodes have ample energy and computing power (i.e. Storage and processing) [1]. In VANETs, communications can either be between vehicles V2V (Vehicle To Vehicle) or between vehicles and roadside units V2I [2] (Vehicle to Infrastructure). The applications for V2V and V2I can be divided into the following three services: safety services, traffic management and useroriented services [3], [4]. Safety services have special requirements in terms of quality of service. In fact, bounded transmission delays as well as low access delays are mandatory in order to offer the highest possible level of safety. At the same time, useroriented services need a broad bandwidth. Medium Access Control will play an important role in satisfying these requirements. In VANETs, the nodes share a common wireless channel by using the same radio frequencies and therefore an inappropriate use of the channel may lead to collisions and a waste of bandwidth. Hence, channel sharing is the...