Reliability Evaluation of IEEE 802.11p Broadcast Ad Hoc Networks on the Highway

In a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) based on IEEE 802.11p, the performance of the communication link is heavily influenced by interference. To quantify the impact of interference, analytical models usually explicitly or implicitly assumed the interference range beyond which interference is ignored. We find that the potential maximum interference range should be related to the minimum interference power that the device can perceive. However, most previous works on VANET performance modeling simply assumed a fixed interference range. The most recently proposed effective interference range dependent on the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) threshold may appear to exceed the potential maximum interference range, resulting in an overestimation of the impact of interference. This paper proposes the SINR related Effective Distance Constrained by the Maximum interference range-based (SED-CM) model for IEEE 802.11p VANET performance evaluation on the Highway. First, we give the potential maximum interference range setting by studying the empirical distribution of interference distance corresponding to the minimum interference power in NS2 simulation. The performance metrics are then derived. The proposed SED-CM model is further extended to the intersection scenario. We conducted extensive NS2 simulations to evaluate the proposed model and compare it with three typical models. Results show that the SED-CM model presents the best evaluation ability. Moreover, we experimentally analyzed the effect of vehicle speed on the performance of VANET by mapping the vehicle speed to the vehicle density. Results show that a faster beacon rate is required to meet the reliability requirement of safety applications with the increase in vehicle speed.