IEEE 802.11 VANETs for Safety of Autonomous Driving: QoS Requirements & Benchmarking

It is anticipated that wireless vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) can further enhance the safety of autonomous vehicles. Recently, two major standards for the next generation of VANET technologies have been suggested and tested: IEEE 802.11p/bd and 3GPP NR-V2X. Compared with human driving VANET, autonomous driving VANET poses big challenges for more stringent requirements on reliability and delay of message transmissions. Up to date, the quality of service (QoS) requirements of VANETs for the safety services of autonomous driving vehicles have not been investigated systematically. Whether or not the current proposed communication systems can meet such high QoS requirements is unclear. This paper reviews the communication requirements for safety use cases, and the QoS requirements for level 5 autonomous driving VANETs are deduced. Then, the QoS of IEEE 802.11-based VANETs, including 802.11p, 802.11bd, and other 802.11 cutting-edge versions, are evaluated by simulations and analyses on a few selected safety use cases and benchmarked against the corresponding QoS requirements. The numerical results reveal that the current IEEE 802.11p/bd cannot meet the QoS requirements for some selected safety applications in autonomous driving vehicles. However, IEEE 802.11 systems with new enhancements can potentially support safety services with assured QoS.