On vehicle-to-roadside communications in 802.11p/WAVE VANETs

A wide variety of applications aiming to improve traffic efficiency or to provide information/entertainment to passengers in vehicles are intended to be delivered in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks in the near future. Most of these applications require vehicles to access a remote network. However, due to the high costs for deploying and maintaining an ubiquitous roadside infrastructure, just a few stationary Road-side Units (RSUs) are expected to be installed, which provide discontinuous and shortlived network connections. In this paper, the feasibility of vehicle-to-roadside communications is investigated when considering features and capabilities of the 802.11p/WAVE standard for vehicular environments. We expect that, by complementing advertisement repetitions from RSUs with smart piggybacking of some RSU parameters in the beacons transmitted by all vehicles (On board Units, OBUs), the RSU-awareness can be improved and RSU-OBU connection lifetimes can be lengthened.