Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have been one of the promising technology that has a great
interest attention from many researchers over the world. Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET)
communications environment as a part of ITS opens the way for a wide range of applications such as safety
applications, mobility and connectivity for both driver and passengers to exploit the transport systems in a
smoothly, efficiently and safer way. Several challenging tasks facing adopting VANET functionality for ITS
such as modelling of wireless transmission and routing issues. These research issues have become more
critical due to the high mobility of vehicles nodes (transmitters and receivers) and unexpected network
topology due to the high speed of nodes. In fact, modelling radio propagation channel in VANET
environment which considers as one of a stringent communications environment is a challenging task. The
selection of a suitable transmission model plays a key role in the routing decisions for VANET. Different
propagation models allow calculating the Received Signal Strength (RSS) based on key environmental
properties such as the distance between transmitter vehicle and a receiver vehicle, the gain and antenna
height of transmitter and a receiver vehicles. Hence, it is useful to calculate RSS and SNR values for a
specific propagation model and then these values can be used later for routing decision in order to find the
best path with high SNR. This paper evaluates the performance of different transmission models (free-
space, two-ray and log-normal) in terms of Receive Signal Strength (RSS). In addition, the performance of
such wireless transmission models for vehicular communication in terms of PDR, throughput and delay is
evaluated by applying the proposed cross layer routing approach based on IEEE 802.11p. By using
MATLAB, the obtained results confirm the best packet delivery ratio for our proposed approach, where it
indicates poor quality of DSSS PHY with high number vehicles. The minimum delay achieved when traffic
density is decreased.