Experimental Evaluation of UMTS and Wireless LAN for Inter-Vehicle Communication

The rapid development of mobile communication technologies in recent years allows their application for inter-vehicle communication (IVC). In this paper, we evaluate the suitability of two wireless technologies for IVC, namely Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) and IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). We analyze the communication properties of these technologies and point out the requirements of applications for IVC. We present a series of practical experiments to evaluate the eligibility of each technology for applications of IVC. To obtain comparable results, we performed measurements based on IP-unicast communication, since the lower layers of the two communication technologies differ drastically. Based on the recorded data of radio coverage, latency and throughput, we draw conclusions on currently feasible and infeasible applications for each technology.