Dynamic channel equalization for IEEE 802.11p waveforms in the vehicle-to-vehicle channel

The IEEE 802.11p standard (or Dedicated Short Range Communication, DSRC) [1] has been proposed to be the standard for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. Since the IEEE 802.11a-based DSRC standard is not fully customized for outdoor, highly mobile channels, the performance of DSRC standard might degrade in a challenging V2V channel. In this paper, we develop several equalization schemes that are able to closely track the V2V channel dynamics and thus improve performance at the physical layer. Through a set of empirical experiments, we show that the performance (in terms of Packet Error Rate) can be significantly improved from 41% (using a simple Least Square Estimator) to 19% (using a Spectral Temporal Averaging Estimator).