802.11p: Insights from the MAC and Physical Layers for a Cooperate Car Following Application

We present a simulation study of a cooperate car following application implemented by the Wireless Access for Vehicular Environments (WAVE) protocol stack, which uses the MAC and Physical layers defined by the IEEE 802.11p protocol. This is a simple Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) application which forms the foundation for autonomous driving. As with many safety-critical ITS applications, cooperate car following uses beaconing as the primary means of communication. The beacon frequency and the transmit power of the mobile nodes are considered as the key communication parameters, while the vehicle density is considered as the key traffic parameter. The two main factors affecting the performance, the end-to-end delay and the packet loss, are studied for different scenarios defined by the above parameters. Results indicate how the application performance may be improved by adapting the beacon frequency and/or the transmit power according to the vehicular traffic density.