Vehicular Wireless Communication Standards: Challenges and Comparison

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are the future of mobility. Safe and reliable AVs are required for widespread adoption by a community which is only possible if these AVs can communicate with each other & with other entities in a highly efficient way. AVs require ultra-reliable communications for safety-critical applications to ensure safe driving. Existing vehicular communication standards, i.e., IEEE 802.11p (DSRC), ITS-G5, & LTE, etc., do not meet the requirements of high throughput, ultra-high reliability, and ultra-low latency along with other issues. To address these challenges, IEEE 802.11bd & 5G NR-V2X standards provide more efficient and reliable communication, however, these standards are in the developing stage. Existing literature generally discusses the features of these standards only and does not discuss the drawbacks. Similarly, existing literature does not discuss the comparison between these standards or discusses a comparison between any two standards only. However, this work comprehensively describes different issues/challenges faced by these standards. This work also comprehensively provides a comparison among these standards along with their salient features. The work also describes spectrum management issues comprehensively, i.e., interoperability issues, co-existence with Wi-Fi, etc. The work also describes different other issues comprehensively along with recommendations. The work describes that 802.11bd and 5G NR are the two potential future standards for efficient vehicle communications; however, these standards must be able to provide backward compatibility, interoperability, and co-existence with current and previous standards.