IEEE 802.11p: Laboratory measurements and analysis

The IEEE 802.11p amendment to the ubiquitous IEEE 802.11 standard has been recently published. It addresses some modifications to the Medium Access Control (MAC) and physical layers to better suit the requirements of communications between moving vehicles. Even though the industrial diffusion of IEEE 802.11p equipment has been very limited so far, still it has gained popularity for uses in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs), mostly for safety applications, e.g., lane change or accident notification through opportunistic multi-hop transmissions. In this paper we report the main differences brought by the `p´ amendment, and report the results from testbed tests carried out in our laboratories with NEC Linkbird-MX IEEE 802.11p cards, which are among the first public data from real measurements made available to the scientific community.