Performance evaluation of IEEE 1609 WAVE and IEEE 802.11p for vehicular communications

In this paper we study the performance of the IEEE 1609 WAVE and IEEE 802.11p trial standards for vehicular communications. We have implemented key components of these standards in a simulation environment also supporting realistic vehicular mobility simulation. We study both the overall capacity of vehicular networks utilizing the said standards, as well as delay performance, which is an extremely important performance metric especially for safety applications. Our results show that the traffic prioritization schemes selected for the standards work well, and even in the presence of multi-channel operation implemented by the IEEE 1609.4 the delay of control messages of highest priority remains on the order of tens of milliseconds. Thus even with high densities of vehicles these standards should yield a stable platform a variety of vehicular applications can be built on.