Abstract—Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) improve passenger/pedestrian safety and transportation productivity through the use of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside wireless communication technologies. Communication protocols in these environments must meet strict delay requirements due to the high moving speed of the vehicles. In this paper, we propose an energy-conservative MAC layer protocol, named DSRC-AA, based on IEEE 802.11 that provides power saving to the ITS communication modules (e.g., On Board Units, portable devices, and Road Side Units) while ensuring the bounded delay. DSRC-AA, a generalization of the Asynchronous Quorum-based Power-Saving (AQPS) protocols, capitalizes on the clustering nature of moving vehicles and assigns different wake-up/sleep schedules to the clusterhead and the members of a cluster. DSRC-AA is able to dynamically adapt the schedules to meet the communication delay requirements at various vehicle moving speed. Simulation results show that DSRC-AA is able to yield more than 44 percent reduction in average energy consumption as compared with the existing AQPS protocols, if to be used in vehicular networks. Index Terms—Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC), Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), vehicular network, wireless communication, energy conservation, quorum system. Ç 1

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ii Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge my sincerest gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Dr. Ivan Stojmenovic of Ottawa-Carleton Institute for Computer Science. Without his enthusiastic and expert guidance during writing this thesis, it would not have been possible to complete this thesis. I am grateful to my co-supervisor Prof. Dr. Amiya Nayak for the help in preparation of this thesis. I would also like to thank my friends and my family in particular for their continuous understanding