Understanding Vehicle-to-Vehicle IEEE 802.11p Beaconing Performance in Real-World Highway Scenarios

Abstract

Periodic exchange of situational information (beacons) is at the basis of most active safety applications in vehicular environments. Despite its fundamental role in raising the level of "situational awareness" onboard vehicles, very little is known to date on beaconing performance in a real vehicular environment. This paper analyzes the results of two measurement campaigns that have been designed with the purpose of disclosing beaconing performance in a variety of vehicular links, for what concerns vehicle configuration (tall/short), line-of-sight conditions (LOS/NLOS), as well as single-hop or two-hop propagation of the information reported in the beacons. For the first time, beaconing performance is characterized in terms of not only the packet (beacon) delivery rate (PDR), but also in terms of the packet (beacon) inter-reception (PIR) time. The latter metric has been suggested in the literature as more accurately measuring the level of "situation awareness" onboard vehicles than the traditional PDR metric. This paper also presents a simulation-based analysis aimed at estimating the benefit of multi-hop propagation of situational information beyond the second hop of communication. The analysis of the data collected in the measurement campaigns as well as the simulation-based analysis disclose a number of interesting insights which might prove useful in the design of active safety applications. Finally, another major contribution of this paper is promoting the Gilbert-Elliot model, previously proposed to model bit-error bursts in packet switched networks, as a very accurate model of beacon reception behavior observed in real-world scenarios