Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) road safety applications assume a correct, reliable and time-critical exchange of information between nodes to ensure cooperative awareness between vehicles and their neighborhood. While these safety-based applications rely on the single-hop broadcast of status information shared among vehicles on a single channel, in high network load conditions the channel will suffer from severe congestion which subsequently leads to a degradation of the communication performance. In this paper we investigate the capabilities of the awareness control algorithm proposed by European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) in ETSI EN 302 637-2 by comparing its performance with a traditional static periodic approach through a profound simulation study. Although the awareness control approach outperforms the traditional periodic generation method, this algorithm will be limited in highway scenarios due to the high dynamic mobility of nodes.