DSRC Applicability in Cameroon Road Traffic: A Simulation Study

The IEEE 802.11p standard has been amended in the 5.9GHz band in 2010 to provide road safety by enabling vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. V2V communications evolve the exchange of Wave Short Messages (WSM) between vehicles for safety advertisement, either in one hop or multi-hop broadcasts. However, previous DSRC evaluations have shown that this protocol is highly sensitive to transmission conditions, making it difficult to predict its performance. We are interested in finding the best configuration parameters for safety messages broadcasting over DSRC in typical African urban environments. Extensive simulations through the widely used network simulator OMNeT++, Veins, and SUMO show that only a very small fraction (around 30%) of the WSM reach the neighboring vehicles on time. Furthermore, the rebroadcasting of WSM further deteriorates the performances. Thus, the protocol as it is needs to be improved for its application in our environment