Comprehensive analysis of physical layer performance for DSRC in NLOS V2V scenarios

Abstract

Motivated by the development of the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications, both the dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) and the cellular V2X (C-V2X) involved in the radio access technologies (RATs) are experiencing extensive evolution to support advanced vehicular applications and scenarios. Both the DSRC and the C-V2X support the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), and vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communications to directly transmit and receive data between the vehicles, infrastructures, and pedestrians. In addition, the C-V2X can support the vehicle-to-network (V2N) communications via the cellular networks. However, the C-V2X suffers from the challenge in transmitting data within the permissible latency with the higher cellular network traffic load. On the contrary, in the DSRC with short-range wireless technologies, vehicles can directly communicate with each other to exchange information and to largely extend their awareness range beyond autonomous on-board capabilities. On one hand, IEEE 802.11p is more robust and mature with the large-scale field trials performed worldwide and can provide safety and service applications for the intelligent transportation system (ITS) in the vehicular communications. On the other hand, IEEE 802.11bd was proposed as the amendment to IEEE 802.11p with the evolution for IEEE-based V2X communications by enhancing the reliability, throughput, and transmission range. The contributions of the proposed work over the previous work are as follows. Firstly, extensive physical layer (PHY) metrics, containing the packet error rate (PER), packet reception ratio (PRR), output packet inter-arrival time (IAT), and output effective data rate, are sufficiently adopted to accomplish the thorough PHY evaluation which can avoid the limitation brought by the partial PHY metrics. Secondly, various multi-antenna configurations, including the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), single-input multiple-output (SIMO), and multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems, are added to remedy the incomplete analysis on antenna configurations induced by the only single-input single-output (SISO) configuration. Finally, considerably different packet sizes and modulation and coding schemes (MCSs) are discussed under the urban and highway non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios to uncover the impact of each parameter on the PHY performance which cannot be found in the fixed parameter or slightly different parameters. Some important conclusions obtained from a complete MATLAB-based PHY simulation are as follows. Firstly, the multi-antenna systems are more advantageous in reducing the PER, increasing the PRR and transmission coverage, decreasing the output packet IAT, and elevating the output effective data rate, compared to the SISO system, above the distance threshold and below the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) threshold. Secondly, the packet size and the MCS should be adjusted simultaneously in different applications to accommodate their high-reliability, low-latency, or high-throughput requirement. Finally, the urban NLOS scenario with the lower Doppler effect is more tolerant than the highway NLOS scenario in the V2V communications due to its lower PER, larger PRR and transmission coverage, smaller output packet IAT, and higher output effective data rate.