Saving human lives on road has become the prime objective of Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET). VANET-equipped vehicles broadcast periodic safety beacons (single-hop) and event-driven messages (multi-hop) to keep the neighboring vehicles aware of the situation at all times. Well known broadcast communication problems i.e. hidden/exposed nodes, collisions and inherent challenges in VANET e.g. dynamic environment, limited bandwidth, are likely to hinder the exchange of potentially lifesaving information. It is also known that much of the vehicle-to-vehicle broadcast communication will comprise of single-hop periodic safety beacons thus it becomes important to analyze their impact on VANET performance. In this study, extensive simulations were conducted out to appraise the performance of single-hop periodic safety beacons in the context of defined parameters i.e. communication range (CR), beacon generation interval (BGI) and safety beacon size (SBS). The Quality-of-service (QoS) metrics used for the evaluation are packet delivery ratio (PDR), per-node throughput, and end-to-end delay. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.