Implementation and field test of a small-scale WAVE system in IEEE 802.11p V2R/V2V environments

Vehicular communications have become more and more popular as a way to increase the comfort and safety of the transportation systems. The IEEE 802.11p/1609.x protocol stack, also known as the Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE), has attracted much attention from researches. A large number of literatures and simulation platforms have been proposed for the performance evaluation and enhancements for the WAVE protocol stack. While very few real and available testbed is presented, due to the low availability and high cost of IEEE 802.11p/WAVE fully compliant hardware and software. Therefore many simulation results are misleading as the protocol standard is just partially implemented and the testing environment is not real-world representative. In this paper, an implementation of the WAVE standard using commercial off-the-shelf IEEE 802.11 hardware is presented. It provides seamless dual-channel and multi-channel access with synchronous channel switching, which consistently matches IEEE 1609.3/4 protocol. The performance of the implemented system is obtained via a series of testing and validation.