As the adoption rate of connected vehicle technology and the complexity of associated vehicular applications grows, the load on the supporting connected vehicular network will also grow accordingly. Sustaining future application requirements will necessitate network optimization. To that end, a comprehensive understanding of network behavior under different operational conditions is essential. This paper studies vehicular network performance in a DSRC/IP network in terms of a set of network indicator metrics that are controllable through adjustments to lower layer parameters within the DSRC stack. We present and analyze results using DSRC enabled hardware modules that are substantiated and validated through our integrated simulator.