IEEE 802.11p performance evaluation at different driving environments

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET) is an part of future Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) that enables vehicles and roadside units to communicate with each other. Different driving environments, i.e., downtown, residential, and suburban, have different roads topology and characteristics. Downtown environment is mostly characterized with cluttered dense obstacles, residential is characterized with more open spaces mixed with scattered obstacles, while suburban environment is mostly characterized with open spaces. These different characteristics of different driving environments have direct impact on vehicle's degrees-of-mobility, the communication channel, and on the routing protocol classes used. Selecting the right radio propagation model and the routing category for each driving environment is very crucial to achieve reliable performance evaluation of IEEE 802.11p. In the work, using VanetMobiSim tool we create different driving environment models that have all the micro and macro driving details. For each created driving environment we examine the effect of using different radio propagation models (i.e., two-ray ground, Shadowing, or Nakagami) and routing protocol classes (i.e., proactive or reactive routing protocols) on the performance evaluation of IEEE 802.11p. We conclude that obtained results are more valid when radio propagation model and routing protocol classes are paired with the proper driving environment.