Performance and Comparative Analysis of ADSA in a Vehicular Network: MAC Approach in IEEE 802.11p

Vehicular network (VN) technologies have become an attractive area of attention all over the world. Two factors that have contributed in the development, design and implementation of the VN standards include the need to ensure safety and the need to consider road accident avoidance strategies. However, the innate dynamic and the high topological mobility of the nodes in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) raise complex and challenging issues with the standard. One of the complexities is the problem posed by Doppler Effect (DE) resulting from the high mobility of the VANET nodes. In an attempt to compensate the induced Doppler Shift (DS), Automatic Doppler Shift Adaptation (ADSA) was recently introduced to combat DE in a VANET. ADSA proved to be more resilient and effective in term of Bit Error Rate (BER). Moreover, for realistic applications, BER tests alone are insufficient. Therefore, this work explores the strength of the refined ADSA method in terms of throughput and presents a comparative analysis of ADSA versus Adaptive Modulation Code (AMC) and Auto-Rate Fallback (ARF). Results from the analysis shows that the ADSA approach demonstrates strong robustness compared to AMC and ARF with up to 44 to 55% improvement in throughput and a 174 to 182 % reduction in consumed time. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.