Characterizing broadcast packet losses in IEEE 802.11p/WAVE vehicular networks

Broadcasting of data and control packets is expected to be crucial in vehicular environments. Both safety-related and non-safety applications rely on broadcasting for the exchange of data or status and advertisement messages. According to the specifications of the IEEE 802.11p/WAVE (Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments) standard, vehicles tune into a common frequency during the control channel (CCH) interval, where most of the broadcasting traffic is expected to be delivered. The rest of the time, vehicles switch to one of the available service channels (SCHs) for non-safety related data exchange. Although the WAVE channel switching could heavily affect the network performance, it has not been widely investigated in the literature. In this paper, an analytical model is designed for characterizing the losses of broadcast packets by explicitly accounting for the WAVE channel switching. Loss probabilities have been derived as a function of contention window size, number of vehicles and channel errors.