Link-Level Performance of Vehicle-to-Vulnerable Road Users Communication Using Realistic Channel Models

The safety of vulnerable road users (VRUs) can be improved by using direct communications between vehicles and VRUs. The reliability of the communication system is highly dependent on the quality of the communication link between vehicles and VRUs, which relies on the properties of the propagation channel. Hence, in order to accurately design a reliable communication system and evaluate its performance, the channel model must capture the main propagation channel characteristics. In this work, we present link-level performance analysis of the IEEE 802.11p protocol in terms of packet error rate and effective communication range using different fading channel models in critical VRU scenarios. The results show that contrary to the AWGN and the tapped-delay line channels, regardless of the signal-to-noise ratio, an error-free link is out of reach for the realistic geometry-based stochastic channel models (GSCMs). Furthermore, the achieved effective communication ranges in different modulation and coding schemes are presented. It has been found that the IEEE 802.11p protocol with an equivalent isotropic radiated power of 23 dBm is able to achieve an effective communication range that exceeds 100 m for all scenarios except for scenario 1 at 16-QAM 3/4.