Vehicular networks will enable a number of active
safety and traffic efficiency applications. At the core of many
of those applications is cooperative awareness: the ability to
detect location, speed, and heading of surrounding vehicles.
We empirically analyze three key metrics that shed light on
the communication performance available to applications: 1)
Packet Delivery Ratio: link quality in terms of the proportion
of received messages over distance; 2) Neighborhood Awareness
Ratio: the proportion of detected neighbors within a given
distance, which serves as an indicator of the effectiveness of
cooperative awareness message exchange; and 3) Neighborhood
Interference Ratio: the proportion of neighbors above the desired
range of interest, which can provide insight into the interference
levels of fully deployed systems. By analyzing the measurement
data collected within the scope of the DRIVE-C2X project, we
conclude that the link layer delivery and neighborhood awareness
criterion can be fulfilled for safety applications: in the analyzed
datasets, the cooperative awareness ratio is close to 100% up
to 100 meters. Depending on the desired region of interest,
the interference from far-away vehicles can be considerable,
thus requiring effective congestion control to balance between
neighborhood awareness and interference.