Analytical Study of the IEEE 1609.4 MAC in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is developed to enhance the safety, comfort and efficiency of driving. The IEEE 802.11p/WAVE [1] is a standard intended to support wireless access in VANETs. The IEEE 1609.4 [2] is a MAC extension of IEEE 802.11p [1] to support multi-channel operations. In this paper, we propose an analytical model to evaluate the performance for safety and non-safety applications of IEEE 1609.4 under non-saturation condition. The 2-D Markov model is used to model two access categories in the IEEE 1609.4. The analytical model is validated by the extensive simulation, and it shows the effect of different parameters to the network performance.