A Feasibility Study on Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Communication: WiFi vs. WiMAX

Vehicular Network is becoming increasingly popular in recent years, in which vehicles constitute a wireless mobile network. Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) are two different modes of communication in a vehicular network. Some measurement studies have previously been undertaken to understand the feasibility of using WiFi for V2V and V2I communication. Recently WiMAX is emerging as one of the possible candidates for next generation mobile networks. In this work, we set out to understand the feasibility of using WiMAX for V2I communication as compared to the use of WiFi. Due to the hardware limitation, we focus on a static setting in urban environment. Our initial measurement studies show that while WiMAX can offer a longer communication range than WiFi, its latency can be significantly larger than that of WiFi at a short distance (e.g. less than 100 m). In addition, we show the setting of frame size has a strong impact on the performance of WiMAX.