Performance Evaluation of DSRC-Zigbee Heterogeneous Network for Intelligent Transportation System

Transportation is one of the primary needs of human beings that cannot be avoided, with the increasing vehicle can lead to a congested road situation which can lead to less safe road safety. An Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) can be used to increase road safety. This system uses a Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) protocol for network access due to its low latency transmission time. Unfortunately, there is research shows that DSRC has a performance issue in a dense area or increased network load. This problem is mostly solved with a heterogeneous network DSRC-LTE but utilizes mobile phone networks that dynamically change can lead to inconsistent and unpredictable network performance. There is some research about ZigBee for ITS shows that it is decent enough for non-critical applications. Thus, the authors try to utilize Zigbee to create the DSRC-Zigbee heterogeneous network so that the network is independent for the ITS application. The proposed heterogeneous network is a fixed model due to its simple architecture. OMNeT++ and Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) are used to evaluate the performance of the network in an urban area with various scenarios. The simulation result shows that the proposed heterogeneous network is capable to improve the messages dissemination rate by 15.78% and 1.22% in a certain scenario compared to the homogeneous network DSRC only.