Evaluating and improving the TCP/UDP performances of IEEE 802.11(p)/1609 networks

The IEEE 802.11(p)/1609 standard is an emerging technology for vehicular communication networks. It amends the IEEE 802.11-2007 standard and defines a new WAVE operational mode for vehicular environments. The WAVE mode utilizes a combined FDMA/TDMA scheme to manage network bandwidth. In this mode, a node must periodically switch its frequency channel between two different channels over time. Such a design may result in bandwidth wastage due to the residual time caused by channel switching. In this paper, we propose two easy-to-implement schemes to mitigate this problem and compare their TCP/UDP performances with those of the original scheme. Our simulation results provide many insights into the operations of these schemes on IEEE 802.11(p)/1609 networks and show that the proposed schemes always outperform the original scheme.