WAVE Physical Layer

At the physical layer (PHY), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 standard sets the specifications for frame transmissions and receptions over the air. This includes signal modulations, frame formats, and the way different elements of incoming frames need to be interpreted at the receivers. This chapter focuses on PHY operations relevant to vehicle safety communications after a review of the most relevant IEEE 802.11 PHY mechanisms. It describes how the wireless access in vehicular environments (WAVE) PHY layer can be accurately modeled in software. The chapter further describes a network simulator (ns) that was used to generate most of the results on WAVE radio performance. IEEE 802.11a radios use orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) to transmit over the air. Controlled Vocabulary Terms OFDM