Mobile WiMAX for vehicular applications: Performance evaluation and comparison against IEEE 802.11p/a

Vehicular communications have received a lot of attention in recent years due to the demand for applications to improve safety and travel comfort. Nowadays, IEEE 802.11p seems to be the best positioned standard for providing safety services. However, for non-safety services, which usually do not present tight time restrictions but require high data transfer rates, other wireless communication standards such as IEEE 802.16e (Mobile WiMAX) may exhibit better performance. In order to shed light on this question, we developed the physical (PHY) layer of a Mobile WiMAX software transceiver and measured its performance using a channel emulator implemented on an FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) that recreates six different vehicular scenarios, including a highway, urban canyons and a suburban area. Furthermore, we have compared such performance with those obtained with IEEE 802.11p and IEEE 802.11a standards, concluding that, in most of the vehicular scenarios considered, the PHY-layer of Mobile WiMAX exhibits a superior performance. The performance results presented herein can also be used as the input for network simulators to carry out more accurate system-level simulations that should help in making a final decision on which standard should be used in each specific vehicular network.