The Potential of Offloading and Spectrum Sharing for 5G Vehicular Infotainment
This paper explores the possibility of opportunistic cognitive radio based offloading for infotainment services in future autonomous vehicles. With the goal of a truly intelligent vehicle, research into the potential of vehicular communications intends to facilitate a wide range of services from safety aspects such as collision prevention to in car information and entertainment (infotainment) services. With such a broad remit, future vehicles will likely have to rely on multiple communication technologies to successfully service their needs. In this paper we identify the benefits of offloading to WiFi via Drive thru Internet in vehicular applications but note the damaging handover overheads introduced by such schemes. Instead we propose a method of opportunistic access based on Beacon Interval Whitetime to macro cellular WiFi access points as a means of sustaining an active connection whilst moving through an urban environment. This will reduce the inefficiencies of successive handovers and enable increased volumes of content to be delivered to the vehicle. We perform an empirical study of the potential for offloading in a representative urban environment and find periods of upto 100 ms per second are available for opportunistic use throughout the test. Additionally we find semi deterministic opportunities for cognitive access occur following 35% of beacons observed on a WiFi channel.
2016 IEEE 84th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Fall)