Performance Evaluation of VeMAC Supporting Safety Applications in Vehicular Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networking (VANET) is an emerging paradigm that is expected to increase the public safety standards and enhance the safety level of drivers/passengers and pedestrians on roads through a variety of applications. We have recently proposed VeMAC, a medium access control protocol that supports a reliable one-hop broadcast service necessary for high priority safety applications in VANETs. This paper explains how the VeMAC protocol can deliver both periodic and event-driven safety messages in vehicular networks and presents a detailed delivery delay analysis, including queueing and service delays, for both types of safety messages. The probability mass function of the service delay is first derived; then, the D/G/1 and M/G/1 queueing systems are used to calculate the average queueing delay of the periodic and event-driven safety messages, respectively. In addition, a comparison between the VeMAC protocol and IEEE 802.11p standard is presented via extensive simulations using the network simulator ns-2 and the microscopic vehicle traffic simulator VISSIM. A real city scenario is considered and different performance metrics are evaluated, including the network goodput, protocol overhead, channel utilization, protocol fairness, probability of a transmission collision, and message delivery delay.