Cooperative awareness in VANETs: on ETSI EN 302 637-2 performance

Abstract

Cooperative awareness on the road is intended to support the road users by providing knowledge about the surroundings and relies on the information exchange enabled by vehicular communications. To achieve this goal the European telecommunication standard institute (ETSI) delivered the standard EN 302 637-2 for cooperative awareness messages (CAM). The CAM triggering conditions are based on the kinematics of the originating vehicle, which is checked periodically. In this paper, we show that the standardized ETSI protocol may suffer a decrease in communication performance under several realistic mobility patterns. The potential influence of the discovered phenomena on the IEEE 802.11p medium access control operation is studied.