In this dissertation, analysis and design of the efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) sub-layer schemes are considered for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANE~s). The contributions of this study are three-fold. First, an analytical model based on Markov chain is developed in order to investigate the performance of the MAC sub-layer of the IEEE 802.11p for vehicular communications. The results indicate that single channel MAC sub-layers may not be adequate for the future Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The analytical model is validated with the results from simulation-based analysis. Performance analysis based on simulations is given on MAC metrics such as throughput, access delay, packet delivery. Second, a multi-channel MAC protocol is proposed and comprehensively analyzed in terms of channel utilizing and Quality of service (QoS) differentiation for dense VANETs. It is demonstrated that the proposed scheme, namely Asynchronous Multichannel MAC with Distributed TDMA (AMCMACD), improves the system performance in terms of throughput, packet delivery rate, collision rate on service channels, load balancing, and service differentiation for dense vehicular networks. Third, to cope with the interference from contention with neighbours within two hops in large-scale networks, a Large-scale Asynchronous Multichannel MAC (LS-AMCMAC) is proposed. The proposed scheme outperforms other benchmark multichannel MAC schemes in large-scale networks, in terms of throughput, channel utilization, dissemination of emergency messages, and the collision rates on control and service channels.

Wireless communications technology ranging from satellite communications to sensor networks has benefited from the development of flexible, SDR platforms. SDR is used for military applications in radio devices to reconfigure waveforms, frequency, and modulation schemes in both software and hardware to improve communication performance in harsh environments. In the commercial sector, SDRs are present in cellular infrastructure, where base stations can reconfigure operating parameters to meet specific cellular coverage goals. In response to these enhancements, industry leaders in cellular (such as Lucent, Nortel, and Motorola) have embraced the cost advantages of implementing SDRs in their cellular technology. In the future, there will be a need for more capable SDR platforms on inexpensive hardware that are able to balance work loads between several computational processing elements while minimizing power cost to accomplish multiple goals. This thesis will present the development of a random access MAC protocol for the IRIS platform. An assessment of different SDR hardware and software platforms is conducted. From this assessment, we present several SDR technology requirements for networking research and discuss the impact of these requirements on future SDR platforms. As a consequence of these requirements, we choose the USRP family of SDR hardware and the IRIS software platform to develop our two random access MAC implementations: Aloha with Explicit ACK and Aloha with Implicit ACK. A point-to-point link was tested with our protocol and then this link was extended to a 3-hop (4 nodes) network. To improve our protocols' efficiency, we implemented carrier sensing on the FPGA of the USRP E100, an embedded SDR hardware platform. We also present simulations using OMNeT++ software to accompany our experimental data, and moreover, show how our protocol scales as more nodes are added to the network. / Master of Science