Interference-Aware Transmission Scheduling for Internet of Vehicles Mohammad Zubair Khan 1,* , Muhammad Awais Javed 2 , Hamza Ghandorh 1 , Omar H. Alhazmi 1 and Khalid S. Aloufi 3 1 Department of Computer Science, Taibah University, Medina, 42353, Saudi Arabia 2 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, COMSATS University Islamabad, 45550, Pakistan 3 Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computer Science and Engineering, Taibah University, Medina, 42353, Saudi Arabia *Corresponding Author: Mohammad Zubair Khan. Email: mkhanb@taibahu.edu.sa Received: 03 October 2021; Accepted: 13 November 2021 Abstract: Next-generation Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) use wirelessly connected vehicles for safety and non-safety applications such as autonomous driving, cooperative awareness, route guidance and multimedia transmissions. This network known as the Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) suffers from many chal- lenges such as collisions due to hidden terminals, and interference from simulta- neously transmitting vehicles. Moreover, the packet reception ratio of transmissions between vehicles is significantly reduced at high vehicle densities and severe fading scenarios. As safety applications require periodic broadcast of safety messages from each vehicle to all other vehicles in the neighborhood, the development of an efficient medium access technique is a key challenge. In this paper, we propose an interference-aware medium access protocol for vehicu- lar networks that allocate time slots to the vehicles such that interference due to hidden nodes is minimized. We first provide an analytical model to compute the interference range of a vehicle in the presence of simultaneously transmitting vehicles. We also propose a scheduling algorithm that uses vehicle GPS positions and reuse the same time slot only at a distance greater than the interference range. Simulation results show that the proposed technique improves the packet recep- tion ratio by 70% as compared to the standard IEEE 802.11p based CSMA/CA protocol. Keywords: Vehicular Network; ITS; medium access control 1 Introduction Wireless communication between vehicles is used to implement intelligent and smart applications of future Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) [1–6]. As the robustness and reliability of wireless communications have increased over the last decade, many new applications related to passenger and vehicle safety have been introduced. Future vehicles will be smart and autonomous, thus making decisions such as route planning, self-driving, and traffic management [7–9]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing DOI:10.32604/iasc.2022.024091 Article ech T Press Science