Experimental Insights into UDP-Based Video and Control Traffic Over IEEE 802.11P ITS-G5

Vehicular applications such as cooperative driving, teleoperation, and real-time perception increasingly rely on lowlatency wireless communication. In this context, ITS-G5, based on IEEE 802.11p, represents a key technology for enabling direct vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. Despite its relevance, experimental studies focusing on the performance of UDP-based traffic over IEEE 802.11p under realistic conditions remain limited. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of UDP transmission over an IEEE 802.11p ITS-G5 testbed composed of Raspberry Pi-based onboard units and commercial roadside units. The analysis investigates the impact of different modulation and coding schemes (MCS). It also evaluates two network-layer configurations (IPv4 unicast and IPv6 multicast) and the use of CAKE for active queue management. In addition to synthetic traffic generated with iPerf, the evaluation includes real-time video streaming using MPEG-TS over UDP to emulate latencysensitive vehicular applications. Results show that the modulation scheme is the dominant factor influencing latency at low traffic loads, while the choice of transmission mode and IP version becomes increasingly significant under congested conditions. Higher-order modulations significantly reduce latency and variability, whereas IPv6 multicast exhibits greater delay dispersion than IPv4 unicast. Furthermore, active queue management does not seem to improve delay predictability. These findings provide practical insights for configuring ITS-G5 networks supporting latency-sensitive vehicular services.