On field performance analysis of IEEE 802.11p and WAVE protocol stack for V2V & V2I communication

The Automotive Industry worldwide is considering Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) as a promising technology for Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication to support public safety applications, improvement of traffic flow and a number of ITS applications. Though the research on the current topic has been extensively done, yet it is not fully evaluated and analyzed through on field experiments. These wireless networks are prone to fading due to shadowing from obstacles or multipath propagation resulting in attenuation of signal at receiver which leads to high error rates. In this paper we describe and present the results of field experiments that were conducted to evaluate various wireless communication parameters over 802.11p based WiFi network using IEEE 1609 WAVE protocols for a dedicated DSRC hardware. The parameters include delay, jitter and packet loss in DSRC based system when it is made to communicate under various channel load conditions in outdoor environment. We also evaluate and present the results of communication performance under cross channel interference in real field environment.