The Design of a Wireless Access for Vehicular Environment (WAVE) Prototype for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and Vehicular Infrastructure Integration (VII)

Inspired by the overwhelming popularity of nowadays wireless local area networks (wireless LAN, or Wi-Fi), researchers and developers have uncovered their wide application perspectives in a vehicular environment. Currently, several prototypes of dedicated short range communications (DSRC) for vehicular networks have been developed by some companies for both intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and vehicular infrastructure integration (VII). However, most of the designers simply apply the existing indoor wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi, into a vehicular environment without redesigning them for a vehicular environment. The vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) channels feature with doubly selective fading due to the high mobility of vehicles. Both theoretical analysis and experiments have verified that the indoor wireless technologies are unable to achieve optimized and robust performance when applied to a vehicular environment. Industry is calling for new physical and MAC layer protocols for ITS and VII. The IEEE 802.11p workgroup is currently working on standardizing the wireless access for vehicular environment (WAVE), which is anticipated to be ratified in 2009. In this paper, we brief the design of a WAVE prototype based on the IEEE 802.11p protocol, which allows us to implement and evaluate the performance of the IEEE 802.11p standard in a practical approach.