Assessing Mission-critical Vehicular Safety Applications under Various Network Conditions

Abstract

Enabling communication among vehicles can facilitate the deployment of safety applications that can improve driving safety and reduce traffic-related fatalities. Assessing the reliability of these safety applications is essential to evaluating VANETs' contributions to improved safety and driving conditions. In this context, I maintain that reliability metrics that express the requirements of safety applications in terms of network performance are much more suitable than standalone network-level metrics, as the latter do not indicate whether the requirements of safety applications can be met. This work considers awareness as an intermediate layer between the application and the network layers, for identifying the different levels of reliability achievable by the different safety applications. Through a comprehensive simulation study, this work analyzes the level of awareness that networks can offer under various scenarios and a wide range of influencing parameters, including transmission power, message generation rate, vehicular density, message size, as well as radio propagation and fading effects. Insights are provided on how network performance metrics address application requirements and contribute to enhancing the reliability of safety applications. Finally, communication parameters necessary to offering high levels of reliability are determined for three representative safety-application requirements.