Safety-relevant V2X Beaconing in Realistic and Scalable Heterogeneous Radio Propagation Fading Channels

Performance evaluations for heterogeneous communication technologies in the area of V2X safety applications for either improvement, comparison or combination purposes are in general focusing on the realistic representation of the upper communication stack layers, but therefore - often for the sake of simplicity - reducing the radio propagation channel to a maximum range model. The impact and hence the importance to model the environment dependent propagation effects in a representative manner has already been stressed in the literature several times - but separately for ad-hoc or cellular systems and not under the consideration of V2X safety-beaconing applications. By combining a realistic heterogeneous radio propagation channel model with a state-of-the-art V2X communication stack, a representative performance comparison of safety-relevant beaconing applications for 802.11p single-hop broadcast (SHB) and LTE Geocast can be conducted. Our simulation results show that the effects caused by the radio propagation channel cannot be neglected as they significantly impact key communication performance metrics such as channel gain, packet error ratio (PER) and channel load, where we primarily focus on the latter one to give further research directions for an efficient dissemination of safety-relevant V2X beacons.