Vehicular Networking in the TV White Space Band: Challenges, Opportunities, and a Media Access Control Layer of Access Issues

Abstract

With the increase of wireless data traffic demand, supplementing dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) with additional spectral opportunities becomes very important. In many countries, due to the switchover from analog to digital television, a significant portion of the television (TV) band has been released for opportunistic cognitive access. Therefore, one possible solution to the spectrum scarcity problem in the DSRC band is to offload a portion of data traffic to the TV white space (TVWS) band. However, expansion of vehicular networks to the TVWS by means of cognitive radio technologies causes novel challenges such as random channel availability, strict protection of incumbent spectrum users, and dealing with interference among heterogeneous cognitive networks. In this article, we outline the challenges and opportunities involving TVWS access for vehicular networks, with an emphasis on media access control (MAC) layer issues. Numerical results of the DSRC system augmented with a TVWS cognitive module are also presented.