System Level Analysis for ITS-G5 and LTE-V2X Performance Comparison

Vehicular communications, known under the name of V2X (Vehicle to Everything) are expected to grow fast in the next years, bringing for example safer driving conditions, optimized traffic management, energy reduction, etc.. Currently two short range-based technologies (ITS-G5, standardized in Europe by ETSI and derived from WiFi communications IEEE standards and LTE based Vehicle to Everything or LTE-V2X developed by 3GPP and derived from LTE) consider the use of 5.9 GHz ITS band for their deployment. While different countries are more or less advanced in terms of regulation definition for Intelligent Transport System (ITS), it seems clear that the same solution will not be necessarily worldwide deployed. This study compares performances of both technologies by means of system level simulation, in particular considering the European ITS-G5 protocol stack specification. In order to analyze system level performance, physical layer simulation is used to provide Packet Delivery Rate (PDR) versus Signal to Noise plus Interference Ratio (SINR). Then PDR curves are exploited to feed system level simulation aimed at providing statistics about Cooperative Awareness Message (CAM) transmission reliability, in typical urban scenario. The paper provides a brief description of the systems together with the definition of the assumptions and the key results related to the physical layer analysis; it follows with the description of the NS-3 simulator models used for system level simulation (with particular emphasis on PC5 Mode 4) and the discussion about the results which provide insight about the expected and the simulated behavior of both technologies, in particular comparative statistics with regards to CAM success ratio versus maximum communication distance are provided in order to compare the performance.