Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.11p MAC Protocol for VANETs

VANETs is an emerging new technology which integrates the capabilities of new generation wireless networks to vehicles. Vehicle safety has always been a major concern for automotive engineers. Information about one vehicle can be forwarded to another vehicle using the IEEE 802.11p standard protocol, providing a driver or autonomous vehicle with information regarding speed and direction of the approaching vehicle. In this paper, The latest NS-2 distribution package version 2.34 supports simulation of IEEE 802.11p and provides significantly high level of VANETs simulation accuracy. This paper evaluates the performance of IEEE 802.11p Mac protocol by comparing performance of two routing protocols AODV and DSDV this is done by analyzing three performance metrics throughput, packet loss and average end to end delay.