Time division multiple access scheduling strategies for emerging vehicular ad hoc network medium access control protocols: a survey

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging and promising technology, which allows vehicles while moving on the road to communicate and share resources. These resources are aimed at improving traffic safety and providing comfort to drivers and passengers. The resources use applications that have to meet high reliability and delay constraints. However, to implement these applications, VANET relies on medium access control (MAC) protocol. Many approaches have been proposed in the literature using time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme to enhance the efficiency of MAC protocol. Nevertheless, this technique has encountered some challenges including access and merging collisions due to inefficient time slot allocation strategy and hidden terminal problem. Despite several attempts to study this class of protocol, issues such as channel access and time slot scheduling strategy have not been given much attention. In this paper, we have relatively examined the most prominent TDMA MAC protocols which were proposed in the literature from 2010 to 2018. These protocols were classified based on scheduling strategy and the technique adopted. Also, we have comparatively analyzed them based on different parameters and performance metrics used. Finally, some open issues are presented for future deployment.