Capacity limits in a variable duty cycle IEEE 802.11p-based VANET

In this paper, we investigate the capacity limits in an variable duty cycle VANET that uses the IEEE 802.11p standard. We show that the default value of duty cycle that allocates time equally between control and service channels (CCH and SCH, respectively) leads to unbalanced performance, and that the performance of typical traffic on those channels can be greatly improved by judicious choice of the value for duty cycle. We also find the values of spatial density of vehicular traffic that lead to spatial saturation of network traffic.