Interference Issues for VANET Communications in the TVWS in Urban Environments

Within the scenario of the proliferation of smart vehicles, a novel tendency is to exploit the cooperation between vehicles to create vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) using the IEEE 802.11p standard. IEEE 802.11p includes dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) between high-speed vehicles and between the vehicles and the roadside infrastructure in the licensed intelligent transportation system (ITS) band at 5.9 GHz. At such frequencies, fading problems caused by the Doppler effect and/or multipath adversely affect propagation, particularly in dense urban environments. To reduce such propagation impairments, the use of lower frequencies has been proposed in literature, namely the TV white spaces (TVWS) in the ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) band. TVWS is the part of the spectrum licensed to broadcasters that is not occupied at a given time in a given geographical area on a noninterfering/nonprotected basis with regard to primary services. This paper analyses coexistence issues between digital video broadcasting-terrestrial (DVB-T) 2 and IEEE 802.11p transmission in the TVWS. The aim of this paper is twofold: to evaluate the protection of DVB-T2 broadcasting services interfered by IEEE 802.11p communications and the impact of adjacent DVB-T2 services on IEEE 802.11p communications in the TVWS. The main outcomes of this paper are the maximum transmission power level and bandwidth configuration of an 802.11p signal in the adjacent channel (i.e., TVWS) of an active DVB-T2 system while protecting the broadcast service, as well as the error rate curves for each allowed mode of IEEE 802.11p in the TVWS to evaluate the performance of VANETs communications coexisting with DVB-T2 regular services in the licensed TV band.