The emerging Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) architecture, which aims to provide critical traffic information and Internet services, has recently been standardized in the IEEE 802.11p specification. A typical WAVE network consists of one road-side-unit (RSU) and one or more on-board-units (OBUs), wherein the RSU supports one control channel (CCH) and one or more service channels (SCH) for the OBUs to access. Generally, an OBU is equipped with a single transceiver and needs to periodically switch between the CCH and one of the SCHs in order to receive emergency messages and service information from the CCH and to deliver Internet traffic over an SCH. Synchronizing all OBUs to alternatively access the CCH and SCHs is estimated to waste as much as 50% of the channel's resources. To improve efficiency, we propose an innovative scheme, namely coordinated interleaving access (CIA) scheme, which optimizes the SCH throughput by smartly grouping the OBUs to let them access the CCH and SCHs in an interleaved and parallel manner. To further the capability of CIA scheme, an enhanced version is also proposed to handle the case where OBUs with multiple transceivers. Performance analysis and evaluation indicates that the proposed CIA scheme achieves a significant improvement in resource. Thus it can be advantageous to adapt it into the IEEE 802.11p protocol for its adoption in multi-channel wireless vehicular networks.

Wireless access in the vehicular environment (WAVE) architecture of intelligent transportation system (ITS) has been standardized in the IEEE 802.11p specification and it is going to be widely deployed in many roadway environments in order to provide prompt emergency information and internet services. A typical WAVE network consists of a number of WAVE devices, in which one is the road-side-unit (RSU) and the others are on-board-units (OBUs), and supports one control channel (CCH) and one or more service channels (SCH) for OBU access. The CCH is used to transport the emergency messages and service information of SCHs and the SCHs could be used to carry internet traffic and non-critical safety traffic of OBUs. However, the IEEE 802.11p contention-based medium access control protocol would suffer degraded transmission efficiency if the number of OBUs contending on an SCH is large. Moreover, synchronizing all WAVE devices to periodically and equally access the CCH and an SCH will waste as much as 50% of the channel resources of the SCH [1]. As a solution, we propose an efficiency-improvement scheme, namely the agent-based coordination (ABC) scheme, which improves the SCH throughput by means of electing one OBU to be the agent to schedule the other OBUs so that they obtain the access opportunities on one SCH and access the other SCH served by RSU in a contention-free manner. Based on the ABC scheme, three different scheduling and/or relaying strategies are further proposed and compared. Numerical results and simulation results confirm that the proposed ABC scheme significantly promotes the standard transmission efficiency.