A Wireless Token Ring Protocol for Intelligent Transportation Systems

The Wireless Token Ring Protocol (WTRP) is a medium access control protocol for wireless networks in Intelligent Transportation Systems. It supports quality of service in terms of bounded latency and reserved bandwidth. WTRP is efficient in the sense that it reduces the number of retransmissions due to collisions. It is fair in the sense that each station takes a turn to transmit and is forced to give up the right to transmit after transmitting for a specified amount of time. It is a distributed protocol that supports many topologies since not all stations need to be connected to each other or to a central station. It can be used with an admission control agent for bandwidth or latency reservations. WTRP is robust against single node failure. WTRP is designed to recover gracefully from multiple simultaneous faults. It has applications to inter-access point coordination in ITS DSRC, and safety-critical vehicle-to-vehicle networking.