Abstract
There is an ongoing debate in research and industry communities whether IEEE 802.11p or 3GPP LTE should be used for vehicular communications. In this work, we argue that a hybrid vehicular network combining both technologies can increase the performance of the system. We first propose a mechanism to improve locationbased routing in a hybrid vehicular networks architecture, by data and signalling traffic separation on independent wireless networks. We then develop analytical models for calculating the stochastic upper bound of the end-toend delay for location-based routing in three different networking architecture alternatives based on: (a) short range ad-hoc only, (b) cellular only, and (c) the proposed hybrid ad-hoc/cellular network. The analytical approach in this paper is based on Stochastic Network Calculus theory, which provides a solid and uniform framework for analysis of the upper bound of the end-to-end delay in communication networks. It is demonstrated that the proposed hybrid network provides a lower end-to-end delay compared to the other two alternatives. Comparisons of realistic simulation results, carried out in NS3, and analytical results show that the proposed delay bounds provide relatively tight approximations for the end-to-end delay in the three alternative architectures for vehicular networks investigated in this paper.