Link Level Performance Comparison of C-V2X and ITS-G5 for Vehicular Channel Models

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications plays a significant role in increasing traffic safety and efficiency by enabling vehicles to exchange their status information with other vehicles and traffic entities in their proximity. In this regard, two technologies emerged as the main contenders for enabling V2X communications which have stringent requirements in terms of latency and reliability due to their apparent safety criticality. The first one is the Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) standard (referred to as ITS-G5 in Europe) that is well researched since 20 years and has attained enough technical maturity for current deployment. The second one is the relatively new Cellular-V2X (C-V2X) standard that is nevertheless, based on the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard family that have successful deployments in almost every corner of the globe. In this work, we compare the link level performance of the Physical Layer (PHY) protocols for both the technologies for different vehicular fading channel models. To this end, we construct and simulate the PHY pipelines and show the performance results by means of Block Error Rate (BLER) versus Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) graphs. Our investigations show that C-V2X performs better than ITS-G5 for almost all the considered channel models due to better channel coding and estimation schemes.