Modeling Broadcasting in IEEE 802.11p/WAVE Vehicular Networks

IEEE 802.11p/WAVE (Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments) is an emerging family of standards intended to support wireless access in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). Broadcasting of data and control packets is expected to be crucial in this environment. Both safety-related and non-safety applications rely on broadcasting for the exchange of data or status and advertisement messages. Most of the broadcasting traffic is designed to be delivered on a given frequency during the control channel (CCH) interval set by the WAVE draft standard. The rest of the time, vehicles switch over to one of available service channels (SCHs) for non-safety related data exchange. Although broadcasting in VANETs has been analytically studied, related works neither consider the WAVE channel switching nor its effects on the VANET performance. In this letter, a new analytical model is designed for evaluating the broadcasting performance on CCH in IEEE 802.11p/WAVE vehicular networks. This model explicitly accounts for the WAVE channel switching and computes packet delivery probability as a function of contention window size and number of vehicles. © 2011 IEEE