Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.11p Control Channel

The IEEE Task Group has approved recently the 802.11p amendment to enable efficient short range communications for vehicular networks by introducing multiple enhancements at the physical and MAC layer. It defines a control frequency channel for control and most critical data packets and one or several service frequency channels for less critical packets. In this paper, we propose an analytical model for the 802.11p operations in the control frequency. It captures all suggested enhancements important for exchanging data packets generated by road safety applications. We showed through diverse simulations scenarios that our proposed model is able to reproduce expected results. We consider this work as an important step toward understanding the performance of 802.11p-based vehicular communications and the model can be employed in the simulations of safety applications in large scenarios.