Improving the performance of VANETs using many-to-many communication

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have emerged as an area with large number of applications and have gained the attention of the research community. The performance of a VANET largely depends on its properties such as vehicle speed, density, mobility model, and routing scheme used. Use of CSMA as medium access control technique brings many challenges in the overall performance of VANETs. In case of city scenarios where high vehicle density is expected, due to CSMA, a large amount of contention is faced during communication. This eventually has an adverse effect on the delay performance of the network. Many-to-many communication enables simultaneous multi-packet transmission and reception of information between vehicles. In this paper, we for the first time investigate the use of many-to-many communication in VANETs. It is observed through analysis and simulations that use of many-to-many communication for all types of VANET applications gives better performance than CSMA-based VANETs in terms of average end-to-end delay and average packet delivery ratio. We also provide a detailed analysis of the average packet delivery ratio and the average end-to-end delay by modelling the buffers at vehicles and road side units as M/M/1 and M/D/1 queues, respectively. Our analytical results are in good agreement with simulation results.