On the feasibility of utilizing smartphones for vehicular ad hoc networking

Last years, a lot of research was performed focusing on cooperative road safety applications such as nearby traffic jam warning, approaching emergency vehicle warning, road obstacle warning, wrong way driver warning, etc. The high cost of the required in-vehicle systems however seems to obstruct end-user adoption. An alternative could be to utilize smartphones for vehicular ad hoc networking. From a business point of view this seems attractive because smartphones already enjoy a successful user adoption, and they provide most of the hardware required for cooperative road safety applications. However, from a technical point of view there is one aspect of the smartphone approach that could prove to be an insurmountable problem: these phones are equipped with standard IEEE 802.11a/b/g (Wi-Fi) wireless interfaces, instead of the automotive variant IEEE 802.11p. In this paper, a measurement campaign is presented that investigates the technical feasibility of the smartphone approach.