Index Coded Repetition-Based MAC in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

In this paper we propose a new class of repetition-based MAC protocols for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks. The design can be used for safety applications and position information dissemination. An erasure broadcast channel is considered in which several vehicles are in a cluster and each vehicle attempts to send its own safety message to all other vehicles. A distributed feedback mechanism has been introduced to propagate the network transmission and reception information throughout the network. Based on the feedback information, a packet coding algorithm, inspired by index coding, is proposed to efficiently reduce the number of transmissions and contentions. Simulations show that the proposed protocol yields a greater average probability of successful transmission.