Vehicular ad hoc network technologies can improve traffic safety for drivers and provide comfort services for passengers. Because the hardware of a roadside unit (RSU) is costly, in most previous research, vehicles might exchange data with an RSU through multihop transmissions. However, the vehicle with a larger number of hops to the RSU has fewer opportunities and longer time to exchange its data with the RSU because the contentions and collisions increase with the number of hops. This paper proposes the bandwidth utilization and fairness enhancements medium access control (BUFE MAC) protocol, which considers a vehicular ad hoc network that accesses the Internet through fixed Internet Gateways along the road. BUFE-MAC aims at increasing bandwidth utilization, maintaining fairness, and avoiding collision. The performance study reveals that the proposed MAC protocol not only avoids the collision problem but improves the performance in terms of end-to-end throughput and fairness as well.
