Analysis of a S-TDMA distributed scheduler for ad-hoc cellular-V2X communication

Abstract The cellular industry recently proposed a Long Term Evolution (LTE) extension supporting direct Vehicle to Everything (V2X) communication in full ad-hoc mode. Without infrastructure support, a distributed scheduler will play a critical role to the performance of such Cellular-V2X (C-V2X) technology. Self-Organizing TDMA (S-TDMA) is a reliable semi-deterministic and context aware distributed channel access algorithm, which has been considered by European Telecommunications Standard Institute (ETSI) as an attractive alternative to its WiFi-V2X standard, ITS-G5. In this paper, we describe S-TDMA, and present an analytical model to determine its packet reception performance. We then describe and analyze the performance of a distributed Cellular-V2X scheduler based on S-TDMA. We notably illustrate half-duplex issues impacting its performance in a C-V2X context, and propose two extensions to mitigate them. We finally compare their performance against each other, confirming S-TDMA’s potential as distributed scheduler for the future cellular-based V2X technology.