Ensuring safety on the roads can save thousands of people from dying in the road accidents. Many accidents occur due to over speeding of the vehicles and congestion on the roads. In order ensure the safety on the road as well as for infotainment applications IEEE has introduced the WAVE protocol. The 802.11p PHY layer and 1609.4 MAC layer are the bases for the WAVE protocol. The objective of the paper is to evaluate the performance of the WAVE protocol in ensuring the road safety under different traffic scenarios and to bring out the optimal network parameters for ensuring safety. In our model each vehicle broadcasts a beacon periodically containing its location and route. The Road Side Units (RSUs) within the range receives the beacon and replies back with information about the congestion in the future path. Based on that information, the vehicle can change / update the path to its destination. We have performed the simulations with help of two tools, SUMO for generating the traffic and creating the maps and OMNET ++ for simulating the network. We have computed the vehicle collision rate by varying different parameters of our model such as the transmission bit rate, packet interval, Transmission power, vehicle density and mobility. Inferences are drawn based on the simulation results. © 2019 IEEE.