On the Performance of Vehicular Group Communications in IEEE 1609/802.11(p) Networks

Communications in highly mobile vehicular net works are challenging and have gained great attention in recent decades. One promising candidate is the IEEE 1609/802.11(p) network standard suite [1][2][3][4][5][6], which is evolved from the commodity 802.11 technology and revised for vehicular envi ronments. Over the non-safety applications in vehicle networks, group communications are expected to enhance the experience and amusement of driving. In this paper, we design and im plement a Vehicle Group Communication System (VGCS) over real-life IEEE 1609/802.11(p) On-Board Units (OBUs). VGCS can track the group members´ current locations and broadcast voice/data over a vehicle group, enhancing drivers´ and riders´ experiences when they cruise together. The performance of the developed VGCS was evaluated in field trials. Our initial experiment results profile the performance of VGCS in a small-scale real-life network and suggest some heuristics for designing a large-scale vehicular application. To the best of the authors´ knowledge, in the literature rare papers conducted field trials to study the performance of voice applications over this emerging network. Our experiment data presented in this paper can provide basic understanding for future advanced studies in this area.