Evaluation of IEEE 802.11n for Multimedia Application in VANET

Abstract

WAVE by IEEE, CALM by ISO and Car-to-Car are the popular VANET architectures. These architectures mainly focus on safety applications. IEEE 802.11p is the IEEE recommended MAC and PHY layer standard for VANET. Different VANET pro- tocol stacks recommend this standard not only for the safety applications but also other applications. In this paper, we focus on Multimedia-based ad-hoc networking and WLAN aspects for VANETs. The use of Multimedia applications is increasing day by day. Applications like Voice over IP (VoIP), video conferencing, online gaming and file transfer etc. demand time bounded and high throughput services. To fulfill these demands in a vehicular environment, there is a need to evaluate the current IEEE VANET standard for MAC (IEEE 802.11p) to know its limitations for these applications and move towards exploration of a new standard. IEEE 802.11n claims high throughput up to 300Mbps and proved to be more suitable standard for multimedia applications. In this paper, we have evaluated IEEE 802.11p and IEEE 802.11n specifically for multimedia applications in VANET. Simulation results show, IEEE 802.11n comparatively performs better for multimedia applications in urban environment in low BER (bit error rate) as well as high BER as compared to IEEE 802.11p.