Performance analysis and enhancement of IEEE 802.11p beaconing

Abstract

Previous work on the performance analysis of IEEE 802.11p beaconing protocol has paid little attention to the varying number of contending nodes and the restricted channel access: Since each node is allowed to broadcast only one beacon frame per control channel (CCH), the number of contending nodes decreases as the CCH elapses. Thus, the performance of 802.11p MAC protocol varies with the number of contending nodes, and the expiration of CCH may cause the beacon messages to drop. In this paper, we propose a new mathematical model to analyze the performance of 802.11p MAC, which considers both the effects of changing number of contending nodes and the restricted channel access. Based on the analytic results, a random contention window scheme is proposed. Through conducting extensive simulations, we verify that the proposed scheme considerably outperforms the legacy 802.11p protocol.