Time Dependent Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.11p Vehicular Networks

The performance of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is subject to frequent changes due to node mobility, so that nonstationary/transient network behavior always exists. In addition, safety applications in VANETs are very sensitive to the real-time performance of delay and packet delivery ratio. Although there are extensive studies on the steady-state performance analysis of vehicular networks, little work exists on evaluating their time varying behavior. In this paper, we develop a performance model to efficiently estimate the dynamic behavior of VANETs. In this work, vehicle’s transmission queue is modeled using fluid-flow based differential equations which are solved using numerical methods, while network hearing topology is modeled by a time varying adjacency matrix which can be determined from stochastic models, measurements or discrete event simulations. Numerical results illustrate that our performance model is able to promptly respond to the ongoing dynamic conditions of VANETs and provide reasonably accurate performance results