Experiences with UHF bands for content downloading in vehicular networks

Vehicular networks are expected to support both safety and non-safety applications, through Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) in 5-GHz bands. These channels, however, are of limited capacity and recent studies have high-lighted their scarcity, in comparison to the broad range of services that are envisioned in vehicular networks. We therefore explore the benefit of using UHF bands for the transmission of control messages, so as to acquire more capacity. Specifically, we focus on content downloading, and design a protocol that leverages the UHF band for control messages and the high-throughput, 5-GHz bands for data delivery. We develop a testbed to quantify the performance of our approach, and show a 3x throughput gain in content delivery with respect to the case where only 5-GHz bands are used.