An error model for inter-vehicle communications in highway scenarios at 5.9GHz

The design and evaluation of Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) protocols rely much on the accurate and efficient computational simulations. For simulations of Medium Access Control (MAC) and higher layers, the modeling work of underlying Physical layer (PHY) and wireless channel has impacts both on the computational efficiency of simulations and on the correctness of results. In this contribution, we discuss the modeling issues of the inter-vehicle wireless channel in highway scenarios and the packet error performance of Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) PHY, which works at the newly allocated 5.9GHz Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) frequency band. A computationally efficient yet accurate enough error modeling approach used in our MAC layer simulator WARP2 is presented in this paper, together with simulation results. Both weaknesses and potential improvements of the proposed approach are discussed also in this work.