Reliability and performance of IEEE 802.11n for vehicle networks with multiple nodes

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) have generated considerable research interest in recent years since VANETs can be used to effectively support Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications and can potentially maximize their performance and reduce their implementation cost. However, the majority of VANET studies have been carried out in network simulators which may not represent real vehicular environments. Experimental studies, on the other hand, can produce more realistic results, although they involve higher experimental cost. This paper describes common unrealistic assumptions and misconceptions in VANET simulations and discusses challenging implementation issues, focusing on reliability and performance of typical VANET configurations in empirical case studies. Our experimental results show that interference from multi-hop routing and broadcast can reduce throughput performance, increase packet loss rate, and jitter.