A Measurement Study of Time-Scaled 802.11a Waveforms over the Mobile-to-Mobile Vehicular Channel at 5.9 GHz

We have studied the effects of the mobile vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) channel on scaled versions of the current IEEE 802.11a standard to investigate how readily they can be applied to vehicular networks. In particular, measured parameters for the V2V channel at 5.9 GHz in suburban, highway, and rural environments are studied in the context of critical parameters for OFDM. Actual performance of scaled OFDM waveforms with bandwidths of 20 MHz (bandwidth of IEEE 802.11a), 10 MHz (bandwidth of the draft IEEE 802.11p), and 5 MHz (halved bandwidth of IEEE 802.11p) are described and interpreted in light of the channel parameters. At 20 MHz the guard interval is not long enough, while at 5 MHz errors increase from lack of channel stationarity over the packet duration. For these choices of the scaled 802.11a OFDM waveform, 10 MHz appears to be the best choice.