Modeling and Analysis of 802.11p Physical Layer for V2X Connected Transport Systems Considering Harsh Operating Conditions and HW Device Performance

Intelligent driving is a promising area for increased safety and comfort. Vehicular communication is an essential part to build such systems. This paper describes the modelling and the implementation of the IEEE 802.11p Physical (PHY) Layer to determine its reliability for vehicle-to-everything (V2X), and particularly vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), communications in the automotive field. A Matlab/Simulink simulation is carried out to analyze not only the baseband processing of the transceiver, but also the RF hardware part, the physical channel in different operating conditions and environments, and all the main impairments and sources of interferences/noise. The transceiver model consists of three parts, the transmitter, the receiver and the intermediate channel block. The model can be used to explore the performance (bit-rate, successfully delivered packet-rate, latency,..) of V2X links in different conditions (line-of-sight, non-line-of-sight), and environments (urban, suburban, rural and highway), considering single-hop or multi-hop networking, and allowing also dynamically changing the channel characteristics, or even using different modulation and coding schemes and physical transmission parameters. To assess the proposed V2X simulation tool, the simulation results are compared to the theoretical performance and to experimental results, obtained using the NEC LinkBird-MX C2X device. The proposed simulation tool can be useful to study the impact of vehicles distance, speed and operating scenario on the reliability of the communication system, once fixed the hardware apparatus, or to specify the performance of the hardware components needed to ensure a given V2X communication performance.