A Survey on Qualitative Analysis of Directional VANET MAC Protocols

Since vehicles' trajectories are so complex and dense traffic changes in nature frequently, the VANET (Vehicles Ad-hoc Network), using Omni-directional Antenna, has many channel collisions (or overlapping) on Data Link phrases (MAC layers). It is not easy to keep a good seamless communication status for VANET because of its unpredictable network environment. Among VANET research, Directional Antenna have been proposed as one of the most common systematical solutions to reduce (or to mitigate) this miss-communication problems by narrowing communicational ranges and making use of its customized error-detection process. However, even though Directional Antennas help VANET keep good seamless communication, many VANET researchers have reported that Directional VANET still has miss-communicational problems - this has lead to problems like 'Directional Hidden Terminal Problem', 'Deafness', 'Un-accuracy Lobe Scopes' and 'High Deployment Cost' being reported in various papers. To establish well-organized design assessments for a good Directional VANET MAC protocol to overcome these problems, we rearranged and grouped current Directional VANET' qualitative criteria from several current survey papers using these categories- 'Directional Discovery', 'Directional Forwarding' and 'Directional Handover'. In addition, based on the results of the following analysis, we show the essential design concerns that need to be looked at in order to develop a well-designed Directional-VANET MAC protocol.