Implementation of a vehicular networking architecture supporting dynamic spectrum access

In this paper, we present a prototype of a decentralized vehicular communications networking architecture that is capable of performing dynamic spectrum access (DSA) while operating under mobile conditions. Referred to as vehicular dynamic spectrum access (VDSA) networking, our prototype implementation employs software-defined radio (SDR) technology at each of the vehicular wireless nodes that have been programmed to simultaneously perform multi-hop routing and DSA. To evaluate the proposed VDSA implementation, a prototype network consisting of four mobile nodes was deployed in an actual highway operating environment, where the wireless transmission links between any two vehicular nodes were established using unoccupied portions of the ISM band between 2.4 GHz and 2.5 GHz. The performance of the proposed VDSA networking architecture was assessed experimentally in terms of the completion of end-to-end multi-hop relaying across the four vehicular nodes, the overall data throughput, and the network latency. The experimental results show that the proposed network architecture performed a combination of DSA and multi-hop routing with the efficiency of up to 72.5% per hop.