Improving vehicular safety message delivery through the implementation of a cognitive vehicular network

The Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) protocol stack has been recently defined to enable vehicular communication on the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) frequencies. Some recent studies have demonstrated that the WAVE technology might not provide sufficient spectrum for reliable exchange of safety information over congested urban scenarios. In this paper, we address this issue, and present a novel cognitive network architecture in order to dynamically extend the Control Channel (CCH) used by vehicles to transmit safety-related information. To this aim, we propose a cooperative spectrum sensing scheme, through which vehicles can detect available spectrum resources on the 5.8 GHz ISM band along their path, and forward the data to a fixed infrastructure known as Road Side Units (RSUs). We design a novel Fuzzy-Logic based spectrum allocation algorithm, through which the RSUs infer the actual CCH contention conditions, and dynamically extend the CCH bandwidth in network congestion scenarios, by using the vacant frequencies detected by the sensing module. The simulation results reveal the effectiveness of our architecture in providing dynamic and scalable allocation of spectrum resources, and in increasing the performance of safety-related applications.