Performance of the 802.11p Physical Layer in Vehicle-to-Vehicle Environments

A reliable robust wireless network of connected vehicles is desired to enable a number of future telematics and infotainment applications in the vehicular domain. To achieve this objective, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is standardized by the IEEE 802.11p Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) standard. Providing reliable communication performance in a highly dynamic time-varying V2V channel is a challenging task. To tackle this challenge, we propose a dynamic equalization scheme, on top of the existing DSRC technology, that significantly improves the packet error rate (PER) of data transmissions without changing the DSRC standard. We also show a hardware implementation of this scheme based on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to demonstrate its implementation feasibility. Furthermore, we extend our improved equalization scheme to various data rate options available in the DSRC standard, showing that the proposed scheme is sufficiently generic to support different types of V2V communication. Finally, we report the results of investigating the dependence of wireless communication performance (in terms of PER and throughput) on various design parameters such as packet length, payload size, and data rate.