Comparative Analysis of IEEE 802.11p and IEEE 802.16-2004 Technologies in a Vehicular Scenario

A major challenge of the automobile industry and safety authorities is how to improve the way cars can communicate either among themselves or with infrastructure designed to assist drivers. Sichitiu and Kihl in [1] describe a taxonomy based on the way nodes (in this case, cars) exchange data. Their work involves two forms of vehicular communication: vehicle-to-vehicle communication (IVC) and vehicle to roadside communication (RVC). IVC can employ either a one hop strategy between two cars (SICV) or multi-hop strategy between many cars (MIVC). It is important to note that multi-hop strategies begin with one car but use several other cars to relay the information to the car requiring the information. Furthermore, the communication strategy can also be either ubiquitous (URVC) or scarce (SRVC). Because of the highly dynamic nature and multiple demands inherent in Vehicular Communication Networks (VCN), these networks have their own very unique requirements:  The radio transceiver technology must provide omni-directional coverage.  Rapid vehicle-to-vehicle communications must keep track of dynamic topology changes.  Highly efficient routing algorithms need to fully exploit network bandwidth. The increased interest in vehicle-to-vehicle (IVC) and vehicle-to-roadside communication (RVC) is due, in part, to the need to expand the amount of information relayed to vehicles. As previously mentioned, the information relayed today is no longer limited to cellular telephone service. As the need to transmit more information grows, so must the technology used to carry that information from car to car or from communications tower to tower. Some applications are more suitable for vehicle-to-roadside communications in applications that involve automatic payment, route guidance, cooperative driving and parking management, just to name just a few. However, there are other applications that are more appropriate for vehicle-to-vehicle communications, including intelligent cruise control, intelligent maneuvering control, lane access and emergency warning, among others. Basically, there are three main categories of applications that have been targeted: (i) road safety applications, (ii) traffic efficiency applications, and (iii) value-added applications. Each