Military Inter-Vehicle Communication with message priority using IEEE 802.11e

In this paper, we study the use of IEEE 802.11e for priority based messaging in Military Inter-Vehicle Communications (IVC). In the battlefield, messages generated by military vehicles (i.e., urgent combat related messages, warning messages) have different priorities which have different performance requirements in terms of delay and reliability. The message priorities are assigned based on the urgency of the message. For example, combat related messages will have the highest priority which is reflected in the lowest delay and highest reliability. We investigate the use of IEEE 802.11e to provide such priority based service differentiation. We examine a number of parameters' setting in the IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distribution Coordination Access (EDCA) that will meet military vehicular communication requirements for different types of messages. OPNET based simulation studies are conducted to compare the protocol performance for each priority in terms of average delay as well as the percentage of dropped data. The results show that using proper parameters' setting for 802.11e will result in an efficient solution for IVC that supports different priority messaging.