California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

One of the key goals of a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is providing sufficient quality of service (QoS) for real-time safety applications while concurrently supporting commercial services. This paper proposes a multi-channel wireless communication architecture and protocol for the scenario where commercial services are provided by roadside infrastructure. This solution extends the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN protocol to schedule periodic safety messages in a "safety channel". It explicitly supports concurrent non-time-critical communications in separate, non-safety "service channels". Further, it is shown that this arrangement maximizes service channel access time while maintaining the requisite QoS for safety applications. This paper concludes with simulations that confirm the attractive properties of this architecture and protocol.