The IEEE Task Group has approved recently the
802.11p amendment to enable efficient short range communications
for vehicular networks by introducing multiple enhancements
at the physical and MAC layer. It defines a control
frequency channel for control and most critical data packets
and one or several service frequency channels for less critical
packets. In this paper, we propose an analytical model for
the 802.11p operations in the control frequency. It captures all
suggested enhancements important for exchanging data packets
generated by road safety applications. We showed through
diverse simulations scenarios that our proposed model is able
to reproduce expected results. We consider this work as an important
step toward understanding the performance of 802.11pbased
vehicular communications and the model can be employed
in the simulations of safety applications in large scenarios.
