Performance Evaluation of Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication for Cooperative Collision Avoidance at Urban Intersections

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication can significantly enhance the performance of collision avoidance systems through periodically exchanging information between vehicles. At urban intersections, the effect of shadowing caused by buildings has a severe influence on the communication performance. In addition, an increased traffic density near an intersection creates a high level of interference, which can lead to a communication performance degradation. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of IEEE 802.11p based V2V communication for cooperative collision avoidance at urban intersections. We focus on the impact of shadowing from buildings and of traffic density on the communication performance. For this purpose, we investigate the effect of both the data rate and transmission power in different scenarios. The simulation results show that transmission power and data rate can be tailored to increase the reliability of the communication for the collision avoidance system. Simulation results also show that buildings at intersections reduce the interference from vehicles in other road sections. In addition, our simulation results reveal more insight on the main cause of packet loss near intersections. They show that loss due to packet collisions is the dominant reason, which can be reduced by increasing the data rate.