A performance study of cooperative awareness in ETSI ITS G5 and IEEE WAVE

The idea of wirelessly connected vehicles has long ceased to be a vision as researchers from both academic and industrial institutions and field operational tests all over the world are contributing to bringing this technology to life. Both ETSI and IEEE have been working on respective standards (ETSI ITS G5 in Europe, IEEE WAVE in North America) to enable this new application of wireless communication. In this paper we compare medium access in these systems by means of an extensive simulation study while focusing on the transmission of periodic safety messages on the control channel. We observe that for different reasons high node density scenarios appear to be critical for the overall performance of both systems. This includes end-to-end delay, packet error rates and a non-optimal channel utilization that leaves room for improvement. We find that the approach proposed by ETSI ITS G5 with Decentralized Congestion Control (DCC) may access the channel rather conservatively but still outperforms IEEE WAVE in most of the scenarios.