Realistic Simulation of IEEE 802.11p Channel in Mobile Vehicle to Vehicle Communication

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is becoming an important paradigm, because of its ability to enhance safety and to mitigate congestion on road traffic scenarios. Realizing the fact that data collection scheme from in-situ test beds for large number of vehicles is always expensive and time consuming, before being employed in large scale, such safety critical system should be tested narrowing down the gap between real circumstances and analytical models in a simulation platform. It is evident that underlying radio wave propagation models can comprise the validity of large scale vehicular network simulation results. Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) channels have higher dynamics due to rapidly varying topologies and environments which have significant impact on performance study of upper layer protocols and applications. In spite of the fact that few measurement based empirical channel models are present in the literature, they are not tested for large scale vehicular networks. In this study, we simulate suburban scenarios with hundreds of IEEE802.11p nodes in the OPNET simulation environment with more realistic channel models. The standard OPNET propagation model was replaced by Nakagami-m fading channel. For the sake of modeling, changing relative velocity attribute and separation distance, power spectrum and fading parameter-m were defined as function of velocity and separation distance respectively. Then statistics were collected to evaluate performance of physical and higher layers. Primarily we have found all the vehicles within the standard requirement for Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) range of 1 kilometer may not receive packets, which was also found in several earlier publications.