LTE and IEEE 802.11p for vehicular networking: a performance evaluation

Various wireless communication systems exist, which enable a wide range of applications and use cases in the vehicular environment. These applications can be grouped into three types, namely, road safety, traffic efficiency, and infotainment, each with its own set of functional and performance requirements. In pursuance of assisting drivers to travel safely and comfortably, several of these requirements have to be met simultaneously. While the coexistence of multiple radio access technologies brings immense opportunities towards meeting most of the vehicular networking application requirements, it is equally important and challenging to identify the strength and weaknesses of each technology and understand which technology is more suitable for the given networking scenario. In this paper, we evaluate two of the most viable communication standards, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11p and long-term evolution (LTE) by 3rd Generation Partnership Project for vehicular networking. A detailed performance evaluation study of the standards is given for a variety of parameter settings such as beacon transmission frequency, vehicle density, and vehicle average speed. Both standards are compared in terms of delay, reliability, scalability, and mobility support in the context of various application requirements. Furthermore, through extensive simulation-based study, we validated the effectiveness of both standards to handle different application requirements and share insight for further research directions. The results indicate that IEEE 802.11p offers acceptable performance for sparse network topologies with limited mobility support. On the other hand, LTE meets most of the application requirements in terms of reliability, scalability, and mobility support; however, it is challenging to obtain stringent delay requirements in the presence of higher cellular network traffic load.