Performance Evaluation of IEEE802.11-Based Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks in Vehicular Environments

Communication between cars can be exploited for various applications in vehicular and intelligent transportation systems (ITS). IEEE802.11p standard, which is improved for vehicular applications, will specify the physical (PHY) and MAC layer based on existing IEEE802.11 standard. In this paper we evaluated the performance of IEEE802.11a, IEEE802.11b and IEEE802.11g based vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). It turns out that vehicle velocity is generally negligible to determined performance. The major impact factors found are Car to Car (C2C) or Car to Infrastructure (C2I) communication distance and the availability of line of sight (LOS). And within certain distance IEEE802.11a and g based VANETs can achieve a more stable goodput, while IEEE802.11b based VANETs are more suitable for long distance communication.