Experimental Assessment of IEEE 802.11-based V2I Communications

Connected and automated vehicles are becoming a reality, and the necessity of assessing the performance of their technical enablers plays a pivotal role in the automotive field. Several technologies have been proposed by different standardization bodies, with the aim of enabling the connectivity between vehicles, and between vehicles and the infrastructure. Before the deployment of any technology, it is fundamental to perform a testing and validation phase, which is often performed in simulation environments. However, in order to assess the actual performance of a V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) communication technology, field tests are of utmost importance. In this paper, we present the results of an extensive field test campaign of non-mmWave and mmWave IEEE 802.11 technologies for V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) communications, namely, IEEE 802.11p, IEEE 802.11ac, and IEEE 802.11ad. We assess the performance of each of them, in terms of connection stability, received signal level, Round Trip Time and UDP throughput, in both Line-Of-Sight and Non-Line-Of-Sight conditions. Our results show that, although not specifically designed for vehicular communications, IEEE 802.11ac and IEEE 802.11ad emerge as very promising technologies.