Delay analysis and study of IEEE 802.11p based DSRC safety communication in a highway environment

As a key enabling technology for the next generation inter-vehicle safety communications, The IEEE 802.11p protocol is currently attracting much attention. Many inter-vehicle safety communications have stringent real-time requirements on broadcast messages to ensure drivers have enough reaction time toward emergencies. Most existing studies only focus on the average delay performance of IEEE 802.11p, which only contains very limited information of the real capacity for inter-vehicle communication. In this paper, we propose an analytical model, showing the performance of broadcast under IEEE 802.11p in terms of the mean, deviation and probability distribution of the MAC access delay. Comparison with the NS-2 simulations validates the accuracy of the proposed analytical model. In addition, we show that the exponential distribution is a good approximation to the MAC access delay distribution. Numerical analysis indicates that the QoS support in IEEE 802.11p can provide relatively good performance guarantee for higher priority messages while fails to meet the real-time requirements of the lower priority messages.