A Comparison of 802.11a and 802.11p for V-to-I Communication: A Measurement Study

802.11p, also known as WAVE, is a standard protocol intended for future traffic systems in order to support safety and commercial non-safety applications for vehicular communication. 802.11p is modified from 802.11a, and both are based on OFDM. The main difference between 802.11a and 802.11p is that the latter is proposed to use 10 MHz frequency bandwidth (half of bandwidth of 802.11a) in order to make the signal more robust against fading and increase the tolerance for multipath propagation effects of signals in a vehicular environment. In this paper, the authors investigate the performance difference between 802.11a and 802.11p for vehicle-to-infrastructure communication through real-world experiments. They measure contact duration and losses of 802.11p and 802.11a in both LOS and NLOS environments.