Next generation vehicular communications via interworking of DSRC and TV White Space

In this work, we propose the use of TV White Space (TVWS) to complement the operation of DSRC technology in vehicular environments, as a Next Generation Mobile Communications platform for vehicular networking. When a DSRC channel is highly congested due to an increased vehicular density or network traffic, a TVWS network could be used as an offloading option to meet the strict delay required for applications, in particular for emergency messages dissemination. We compare the behavior of a DSRC network and a TVWS network for the case of V2V communications, when emergency messages need to be disseminated in urban and suburban environments. We take into consideration realistic signal propagation models for each network, the distance between vehicles, and the minimum number of hops required when a multi-hop dissemination mechanism is used. We show that the delay using TVWS is less than the delay using DSRC in NLOS urban and suburban scenarios, making TVWS a good candidate for message dissemination when the main network cannot guarantee message delivery.