Doctoral Degrees (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Electrical and Electronic Engineering) by Author "Booysen, Marthinus J."

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    The effect of awareness at the medium access control layer of vehicular ad-hoc networks
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-12) Booysen, Marthinus J.; Van Rooyen, G-J.; Zeadallly, S.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Engineering. Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The hidden terminal problem, coupled with high node mobility apparent in vehicular networks, present challenges to e cient communication between vehicles at the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. Both of these challenges are fundamentally problems of lack of awareness, and manifest most prominently in the broadcasting of safety messages in infrastructure-free vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The design of existing contention-free and contention-based MAC approaches generally assumes that nodes that are in range of one another can take steps to coordinate communications at the MAC layer to overcome the hidden terminal problem and node mobility. Unicasting with the existing MAC standard, IEEE 802.11p, implicitly assumes an awareness range of twice the transmission range (a 1-hop awareness range) at most, since handshaking is used. For broadcasting, the assumption implies an awareness range that is at most equal to the transmission range, since only carrier sensing is used. Existing alternative contention-free approaches make the same assumption, with some protocols explicitly using a 1-hop awareness range to avoid packet collisions. This dissertation challenges the convention of assuming that a 1-hop awareness range is su cient for networks with high mobility, such as VANETs. In this dissertation, the impact of awareness range and management of the awareness information on MAC performance is researched. The impact of the number of slots that is required to support the awareness range is also evaluated. Three contention-free MAC protocols are introduced to support the research. The rst is an improved version of an existing MAC method, which is used to demonstrate the e ects on performance of changes to awareness management. The second MAC uses three competing processes to manage awareness information. The second MAC is designed for a con gurable awareness range and con gurable number of slots, and is used to evaluate the e ects of awareness range and number of slots on MAC performance. The third MAC is random access based and is used to evaluate the impact on performance of removing awareness completely. An analytical model is developed to support the simulated results. The simulation results demonstrate that awareness range, awareness information management, and number of slots used are key design parameters that signi cantly impact on MAC performance. The results further show that optimal awareness-related design parameters exist for given scenarios. Finally, the proposed contention-free and random access MAC methods are simulated and performance compared with IEEE 802.11p. All three outperform the contentionbased standard IEEE 802.11p.