Performance Comparison Between IEEE 802.11p and LTE-V2V In-coverage and Out-of-coverage for Cooperative Awareness

Cooperative awareness, consisting in the periodic broadcasting of messages, called beacons, to inform neighboring vehicles about maneuvers, changes of direction and other relevant mobility information, represents the core requirement to enable applications that may increase road safety and transportation efficiency. Up to few months ago, when latest 3GPP Release added to long term evolution (LTE) the support of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, the only suitable standard was IEEE 802.11p in the U.S. and the corresponding ITS-G5 in Europe. The choice regarding the worldwide adoption of one of the two technologies is still under discussion, since both show advantages and drawbacks. In this work, we analyze IEEE 802.11p and LTE-V2V and evaluate their performance for the cooperative awareness service through simulations in a realistic highway scenario. Both in-coverage and out-of-coverage conditions are considered for LTE-V2V. Results reveal that LTE-V2V in-coverage is the best solution in terms of packet reception ratio for all the considered values of beacon size and communication range. As far as the beacon update delay is concerned, we observe that LTE-V2V in-coverage still provides the best performance when small packets are transmitted, while IEEE 802.11p gives the best results for values of the communication range higher than 100 m when the packet size is increased.