Connected vehicles for safety enhancement: Reliability of beaconing in urban areas

Safety enhancement is the main objective to pursue through the exploitation of connected vehicles. To this aim, the exchange of periodic beacon messages through vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications is essential to guarantee a timely and reliable alert, whatever is the targeted safety application. In this paper, we focus on beaconing in vehicular networks and we evaluate the reliability of beacons exchange between vehicles in realistic urban scenarios. Specifically, IEEE 802.11p, which is the actual standard de facto for vehicular communications, is considered as radio access technology and the impact of distance and obstacles on beacons reliability is evaluated. Results obtained through detailed simulations highlight the high impact of distance and obstacles, to be carefully taken into account in the application design.