Performance of Radio Access Technologies for Next Generation V2VRU Networks

The number of road accidents has remained stable in recent years. By using the latest technologies such as vehicle-to-vehicle communications, it is possible to improve road safety and reduce the number of road fatalities, especially for vulnerable road users (VRUs). There are two existing radio access technologies (RAT) for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications, i.e., Wi-Fi -based by IEEE (802.11p and its next-generation standard 802.11bd), and cellular-based by 3GPP (LTE-V2X and 5G NR-V2X). Although many works have evaluated and compared the performance of V2V RAT communications, very little work has been done to compare the performance of these technologies in the context of vehicle-VRU communications. In this paper, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first work that evaluates the performance of each RAT in the context of vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) and vehicle-to-cyclist (V2C) communications. Using four performance metrics, namely packet error rate (PER), packet reception rate (PRR), throughput, and latency, we examined whether each RAT can meet the requirements of safety applications intended for implementation in urban areas. The answer to this question is yes. However, each RAT has its own performance profile. In terms of PER and PRR, 802.11bd has an advantage, while in terms of throughput and latency, 5G NR-V2X performs better.