Introduction

The development of ITS radio communication is moving rapidly on several fronts. FCC recently allocated the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) spectrum in the 5.9 GHz band. IEEE is taking up the standardization of the associated radio technology Wireless Access for Vehicular Environments (WAVE). Industry groups such as Vehicle Safety Communication Consortium (VSCC) and DSRC Industry Consortium are working hard on safety enhancement, congestion mitigation, commercial and transit vehicle applications in partnership with the Intelligent Vehicle and Infrastructure Consortium Initiatives (IVI, IC) by USDOT. In order to help California leverage this promising technology, we propose to develop a DSRC/WAVE test-bed for testing and evaluation of the radio and communication protocol standards in the context of high-value ITS applications. We propose to leverage the MIMO radios being developed by UCLA for ITS communications.

Research Plan

Our research plan is to:

1. Produce four highly programmable DSRC compliant radios consistent with basic elements of the current IEEE/ASTM standard specifications and the recent FCC ruling determining the DSRC bandplan,
2. Integrate four DSRC radios into the testbed,
3. Develop a protocol architecture for easy plug and play in the testbed with DSRC protocol prototypes produced by different research groups,
4. Deliver one implementation for each module in the architecture, constituting a functioning DSRC protocol stack from medium access control to application layers on top of the radios, and
5. Demonstrate a collision warning, a toll-type transaction, and a multimedia download while two vehicles travel at high-speed.

• Quality of Service (QoS) of vehicle to roadside communications such as bandwidth, packet drop rate, and delay in real traffic environment and at highway speeds.
• Scalability of infrastructure deployment and communication protocols with potentially all vehicles being equipped with the DSRC/WAVE technology.
• Co-existence of multiple public and private service providers in the same area.
• Effective operation of applications like cooperative safety warning, intelligent ramp metering, probe vehicle data mining, dynamic incident response, multimedia content transfer, and tolling.