Abstract
To improve throughput and reduce channel contention over inter-vehicle communication in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), wireless communication devices should effectively and efficiently utilize multiple channels dedicated to VANETs. To this end, we propose a multiple-channel MAC protocol which aims to fully and uniformly utilize all available channels in a random-access manner, considering the constraint that a device has only one or a small number of antennas (radio interfaces). In a wireless network where there are channels than radio interfaces on a device, a sender has to finds out a common channel before negotiating/selecting a channel used later for data transmission to the receiver. We design two different mechanisms for the cases with different numbers of radio interfaces, based on the concept of quorum system. The simulation result shows that compared with other protocols, our quorum-based protocol has either higher system throughput or shorter negotiation duration.