MEDIUM ACCESS CONTROL IN VANET USING RELAY NODES

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a kind of Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET). It is a network of vehicles with wireless communication devices. IEEE 802.11p is a medium access control (MAC) standard to support VANET. Many applications of VANET require network performance such as high packet delivery ratio, low end-to-end delay, high throughput, etc. Due to high mobility and node density, VANET is a challenging area for research. A relay node may be used for VANET to gather data from the nearby transmitting nodes and forward it to the required destination node. A relay node may be a static RSU (Road Side Unit) or a mobile node. The packet delivery performance is influenced by the nature of the relay node used in the VANET system. In this paper, IEEE 802.11p MAC protocol is evaluated and a comparative study of the network performance is done using mobile relay nodes and the static relay node.