Performance Analysis of DSRC-Based Vehicular Safety Communication in Imperfect Channels

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication empowers vehicles to share information by broadcasting basic and critical safety messages. Dedicated short-range communication (DSRC), the medium access control (MAC) layer of which utilizes the IEEE 802.11p protocol, is a promising candidate technology for vehicular communication. Safety applications usually demand safety message dissemination to be prompt and reliable. To satisfy these strict requirements, the MAC layer of vehicular safety communication tends to adopt Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) or single-class Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) without request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS), acknowledgment (ACK) and retransmission mechanisms as the access scheme. As far as we know, although many numerical models have been provided to understand the IEEE 802.11 DCF performance, there is no precise model that examines the performance of vehicular safety communication exploiting such an access scheme in imperfect channels with different incoming traffic loads. In this paper, we settle this problem by developing an analytical model where the impacts of various incoming traffic loads, packet length distribution, hidden terminal effects, node mobility, the MAC layer queuing system, and the faulty radio channels are all included which no one has done this before. The experimental and numerical results reveal that the constructed model can exactly forecast the vehicular network performance of packet delay, delivery rate, and reception rate under different traffic and channel circumstances.