Cooperative Awareness in the Internet of Vehicles for Safety Enhancement

Connected vehicles will improve safety and enable new services to drivers and passengers. One of the main enabled services will be the cooperative awareness, that is the broadcast transmission of periodic messages containing updated information on status and movements. This continuos communication may help the drivers in critical situations and eventually enable vehicles to autonomously coordinate their actions. Being IEEE 802.11p still the de-facto standard for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, in this paper we investigate its performance for cooperative awareness through large scale simulations involving hundred of nodes under various settings, and considering the combinations of different modulations and coding schemes. Results highlight the effect of traffic density, obstacles, and physical layer settings on both the reception reliability and the delay of information update, giving guidelines for the system design under realistic propagation and road traffic conditions.