Suitability of IEEE 802.11ac/n/p for Bandwidth Hungry and Infotainment Applications for Cities

The Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) addresses issues regarding road safety and efficiency in the domain of Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). In the last few years, research in ITS has been focused on delay sensitive and bandwidth hungry applications, which demand time bounded and high throughput services. In this paper, we analyzed 802.11ac, n and p with regard to their suitability in different VANET scenarios, specifically where applications require reliability and high data rate. We simulated these standards by considering different urban scenarios and varying different parameters such as speed, nodes, traffic loads, and bit error rate etc. We observed that 802.11n and 802.11ac performed comparatively well in most of the scenarios due to their enhanced MAC layer mechanisms. Frame aggregation with block acknowledgement significantly increases the bandwidth and reduces the delay. IEEE 802.11p, on other hand, allows transmission range of 1000 m, which is five times larger than for 802.11n or 802.11ac.