Performance evaluation of IEEE 802.11p for vehicular traffic congestion control

Vehicular traffic congestion in metropolitan cities during disaster is a challenge which presents dire consequences for transporting VIPs, life saving drugs, patients, accident victims in need of immediate medical assistance etc. With better navigation system and real-time traffic congestion updates, the vehicles can overcome delays. Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANETs), transmits the real time congestion information to the vehicles from a centralized database to avoid unexpected congestion and follow the shortest path to the destination. In this paper a proposed prototype which can be modified to work for the requirement with different models, such as general traffic prediction and re-routing during emergencies in case of fire, accidents etc. along the route is worked out. IEEE 802.11p which has been introduced exclusively for vehicular environments has been implemented at the Physical and Medium Access Control(MAC) layers of the WAVE protocol stack which was considered for a metropolitan city over an unpredictable high density of vehicles. Evaluation of the performance of IEEE 802.11p, Wireless Access for Vehicular Environment (WAVE) communication standard against IEEE802.11a for the vehicular environment for multiple scenarios has been simulated and the results are encouraging. © 2011 IEEE