Simulation-Based Capacity Estimates for Local Broadcast Transmissions

The periodic transmission of status updates by all vehicles in a vehicular network represents a service primitive that forms the basis for a lot of envisioned applications, in particular safety related ones. Due to the limited resources that a wireless communication system like IEEE 802.11p is capable to provide, the question raises how much data each node may provide to the system such that the information can still be delivered with the quality of service required by the applications. In this work, local broadcasts capacity is introduced together with straight-forward upper and lower bounds, and estimated by extensive detailed simulations. We show that the ratio of simulation-based capacity estimates and the upper bound is similar for a wide range of system configurations and that the communication system may only be used up to 22% of its upper capacity bound such that service requirements can still be fulfilled.