A Quantitative Approach to Evaluate DSRC Highway Inter-Vehicle Safety Communication

Inter-vehicle safety applications on highways rely considerably on the real-time and reliable communication in the vehicular ad hoc network. For engineers and researchers, it is greatly necessary and important to evaluate the provisions of the communication systems before they start designing them for such applications. This paper presents a quantitative approach to evaluate the quality of service that the inter-vehicle communication (using IEEE- and ASTM-adopted dedicated short range communication (DSRC)) can provide to the inter-vehicle safety application in the context of highway scenarios. Based on the proposed model, we analyze performance indices such as delay and packet delivery ratio (PDR). Outputs of the model are validated by computer simulations. On one hand, our quantitative model provides not only a convenient framework to conduct fast evaluation for the communication of the inter-vehicle safety applications but also a means to analyze the suitability of 802.11a- based DSRC for highway safety applications. On the other hand, it reveals the requirements for further improvement of the performance.