Road crashes and their damages represent a serious issue and are one of the main causes of people death. In this context, Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) are deployed to reduce the risk of road accident as well as to improve passengers’ comfort by allowing vehicles to exchange different kinds of data which ranges widely from road safety and traffic management to infotainment. Nowadays, safety applications are receiving a great deal of attention from researchers as well as from automobile manufacturers. In this thesis, we particularly focus on safety-critical applications, designed to provide drivers assistance in dangerous situations and to avoid accidents in highway environments. Such applications must guarantee to the vehicles access to the medium and have strict requirements regarding end-to-end delay and packet loss ratio. Therefore, our main goal is to propose new medium access control and routing protocols, which can efficiently adapt to frequent changing VANET network topologies. After a comprehensive overview of free-contention MAC protocols, we propose several solutions, based on Time Division Multiple Access Technique (TDMA). We have designed DTMAC, a fully distributed TDMA-based MAC protocol, which does not rely on an expensive infrastructure. DTMAC uses vehicles’ locations and a slot reuse concept to ensure that vehicles in adjacent areas have collision-free schedule. Using simulations, we prove that DTMAC provides a lower rate of access and merging collisions than VeMAC, a well-known TDMA based MAC protocol in VANET. Then, in order to ensure that event-driven safety messages can be sent over a long distance, we propose TRPM, a TDMA aware Routing Protocol for Multi-hop communication. Our routing scheme is based on a cross layer approach between the MAC and the routing layers, in which the intermediate vehicles are selected using TDMA scheduling information. Simulation results show that TRPM provides better performances in terms of average end-to-end delay, average number of hops and average delivery ratio. In the second part, we focus on coordinator-based TDMA scheduling mechanisms. First, we propose the Centralized TDMA based MAC protocol (CTMAC) which uses Road Side Units (RSUs) as a central coordinator to create and maintain the TDMA schedules. CTMAC implements an Access Collision Avoidance mechanism that can prevent the access collision problem occurring more than twice between the same vehicles that are trying to access the channel at the same time. Using simulation we show an improvement in terms of access and merging collisions as well as the overhead required to create and maintain the TDMA schedules compared to distributed scheduling mechanisms. However, in the CTMAC protocol, fast moving vehicles will need to compete for new slots after a short period of time when they leave their current RSU area, which makes a centralized scheduling approach very expensive. In order to further improve the performance of coordinator-based TDMA scheduling mechanisms, we focus on cluster-based TDMA MAC protocols in which some vehicles in the network are elected to coordinate the channel access, allowing the vehicles to remain connected with their channel coordinator for a longer period of time. To this end, first we propose an adaptive weighted clustering protocol, named AWCP, which is road map dependent and uses road IDs and vehicle directions to make the clusters’ structure as stable as possible. Then, we formulate the AWCP parameter tuning as a multi-objective problem and we propose an optimization tool to find the optimal parameters of AWCP to ensure its QoS. Next, we propose ASAS, an adaptive slot assignment strategy for a cluster-based TDMA MAC protocol. This strategy is based on a cross layer approach involving TDMA and AWCP. The objective is to overcome the inter-cluster interference issue in overlapping areas by taking into account vehicles’ locations and directions when the cluster head assign slots