Comprehensive Performance Evaluation of VANETs for Safety-Related Applications

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), broadcast communication is an effective approach to disseminate the safety-related messages to inform the neighboring vehicles. However, the characteristics of broadcast environments lead to poor reliability of the messages. This paper focuses on the comprehensive evaluation to investigate the performance of the safety-related applications, from which we could obtain the optimum performance and ensure quality of service of VANETs. The proposed comprehensive evaluation scheme comprises three parts, with the first applying an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to decide the relative weights of access categories according to the user preferences, i.e. safety-related applications; the second using the entropy and its combination with AHP to determine the weights of performance metrics; and the third adopting the grey relation analysis to rank the alternatives. The analysis results show that the proposed comprehensive evaluation scheme can obtain the optimum performance and also effectively investigate on capabilities and constraints of VANETs.