On the Performance Comparison between IEEE 802.11p and LTE-Based Vehicular Networks

There has been a growing need to integrate communication technologies with transport infrastructure and vehicles. The proposed approach would spur an array of vehicular safety, traffic efficiency and infotainment applications. To address this, majority of the research has been focusing on IEEE 802.11p based vehicular communication. However, despite the efforts from standardization bodies and research consortium development and large-scale deployment of an effective framework still remained a challenge. Given the diverse performance requirements from wide spectrum of vehicular networking applications, several advocate the feasibility of LTE technology as an emerging solution. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the performance of the IEEE 802.11p standard and LTE technology for vehicular networks under various network conditions and parameter values. The results indicate that LTE outperforms IEEE 802.11p in terms of delay, reliability, and scalability, whereas IEEE 802.11p offers acceptable performance for sparse network topologies.