Measurement Study on Packet Size and Packet Rate Effects over Vehicular Ad Hoc Network Performance

A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a type mobile ad hoc network which is developed to increase physical safety of vehicles’ derivers. Many parameters affect the performance of VANET. Packet size and packet rate are two important parameters that need to be considered when using VANET. Different values of these parameters provide different network performance. Using large packet size leads to reduce packet header overhead, but may leads to increase packet loss ratio due to packets collision. Therefore the values of these parameters must be chosen carefully. This paper presents an investigation and analysis of using different packet sizes and different packet rates on a VANET consists of wireless nodes distributed along a highway. The investigation and analysis were performed under varying network environments and for several different evaluation metrics. It is a conclusion of this study that using small packet size gives better network performance than using large packet size. Moreover, the slow packet rate can provide better network performance than using faster packet rate in highway VANET.