On-Road Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.11p/WAVE in BSM Signalling and Video Streaming using WSMP

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) are used for Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications. The IEEE 802.11p/WAVE (Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment) and the recently established WAVE Short Message Protocol (WSMP) communication protocol has been proposed as the standard protocol for designing applications for VANETs. This standard must be thoroughly tested before reliable and efficient applications can be built using its protocols. In this paper, we perform on-road experiments in a variety of scenarios to evaluate the performance of the standard. We use commercial VANET devices with 802.11p/WAVE compliant chipsets for both BSM (Basic Safety Messages) as well as Video Streaming applications on WSMP communication protocol. We show that while the standard performs well for BSM application in lightly loaded conditions, the performance becomes inferior when traffic increases for WSMP protocol. Furthermore, as shown by the results, the standard is not suitable for video streaming due to the bursty nature of traffic, which is a major shortcoming for V2X applications.