Performance of Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication using IEEE 802.11p in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network Environment

Traffic safety applications using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is an emerging and promising area within the ITS environment. Many of these applications require real-time communication with high reliability. To meet a real-time deadline, timely and predictable access to the channel is paramount. The medium access method used in 802.11p, CSMA with collision avoidance, does not guarantee channel access before a finite deadline. The well-known property of CSMA is undesirable for critical communications scenarios. The simulation results reveal that a specific vehicle is forced to drop over 80% of its packets because no channel access was possible before the next message was generated. To overcome this problem, we propose to use STDMA for real-time data traffic between vehicles. The real- time properties of STDMA are investigated by means of the highway road simulation scenario, with promising results.