Performance Comparison of IEEE 802.11p and IEEE 802.11b for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications in Highway, Rural, and Urban Areas

Communication between vehicles has recently been a popular research topic. Generally, the Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I), and Infrastructure-to-Infrastructure (I2I) communications applications can be divided into two sections: (i) safety applications and (ii) nonsafety applications. In this study, we have investigated the performance of IEEE 802.11p and IEEE 802.11b based on real-world measurements and radio propagation models of V2V networks in different environments, including highway, rural, and urban areas. Furthermore, we have investigated the most used V2V mobility models and simulation tools. Comparative performance evaluations show that the IEEE 802.11p achieves higher network throughput, low end-to-end delay, and higher delivery ratio compared to IEEE 802.11b. Overall, our main objective is to describe potential advantages, research challenges, and applications of V2V networks and show how IEEE 802.11p and IEEE 802.11b will perform under different radio propagation environments. 1. Introduction Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication has recently become a hot topic in both academy and automotive industries [1–3]. The communication between vehicles helps to improve road safety. In these networks, vehicles act like sensors and transmit the warning messages to other vehicles in communication range or receive the messages from other vehicles. Drivers can easily detect any abnormal or potentially dangerous situations, such as traffic accidents and traffic jam, by receiving telematics information, including location and speed information. The main applications of V2V technology include road safety applications, including accident warning, and blind spot warning, lane change warning, intersection warning, emergency vehicle warning [1–6]. Also there are efficiency and commercial applications, including route guidance systems, transportation congestion systems, tolling payment, and fleet control. The key factor in V2V communication networks is the mobility of nodes. In addition to mobility challenges, in these networks vehicles should also obey the traffic specific rules and follow the available roads. Therefore, a special form of an ad hoc network for V2V systems has emerged, which has been called vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). Some of the issues that affect the performance of VANETs are high mobility, signal fading, packet collisions, radio interferences on transmitting data, and so forth. The illustration of V2V communication is shown in Figure 1. In general, there are three types of V2V communications [5]. The first one