Current wireless access technologies cannot satisfy all the requirements of future vehicular networks, and 5G could provide a solution to the actual limitations enabling super-fast, reliable, and low latency connections. The road to 5G vehicular networks can be considered opened by the Release 14 of Long Term Evolution (LTE), which enables vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications also out of coverage of the eNodeB. This work firstly focuses on radio access of actual and next generation vehicular networks, by highlighting the main limitations and potentialities. Then, it focuses on beaconing for cooperative awareness and compares the performance of LTE when adopted in different fashions, from the actual legacy solution in vehicle-to- infrastructure (V2I) mode to future potential alternatives, such as LTE-V2V, LTE-V2V with short subframe and LTE-V2V with full duplex (FD) radios. Performance results are provided in terms of medium access efficiency and success probability of resource allocation, and show the potential advantages of future solutions, especially those provided by LTE-V2V with FD radios.