Impact of IEEE 1609.4 channel switching on the IEEE 802.11p beaconing performance

The IEEE 802.11p Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) protocol can only transmit packets on one channel. To support multi-channel operations, channel switching procedures have been proposed in IEEE 1609.4. This paper provides an analysis of the beaconing performance of IEEE 802.11p when these channel switching procedures are used. To analyse the performance of beaconing, simulation experiments are conducted using the simulation tool OMNeT++. An overview is given of existing solutions which can be applied to minimise the impact of channel switching on IEEE 802.11p performance. An interesting observation is that present solutions focus on optimising for use of the Service Channels, and some even deteriorate the performance of the Control Channel.