Modeling and performance analysis of dynamic spectrum sharing between DSRC and Wi-Fi systems

Abstract

The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking 13-22 released by Federal Communications Commission unlocks the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) spectrum for Wi-Fi availability, which undoubtedly brings unpredictable effects to the new-emerging vehicular applications and services. To efficiently harmonize the spectrum operation between DSRC and Wi-Fi networks, several dynamic spectrum-sharing schemes are already proposed to improve the spectral efficiency over a limited bandwidth situation and as well to satisfy the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth resource. Different from most previous literature that mainly focused on the performance analysis of cellular-network-centric spectrum sharing, we aim to analyze the performance of the mainstream dynamic spectrum-sharing schemes specially designed for the coexistence of DSRC and Wi-Fi networks against various combinations of network parameters through a hybrid network model and performance indicators. We employ the Poisson point process to model a hybrid network where DSRC vehicles and Wi-Fi devices coexist, and introduce the performance indicators of spectrum efficiency and data rate to assess the utility of different spectrum sharing candidates. Through the presented hybrid model and performance indicators, we collect extensive numerical and simulation results to investigate four typical spectrum allocation schemes for DSRC and Wi-Fi coexistence, that is non-sharing scheme, original sharing scheme, and Qualcomm's and Cisco's proposals, respectively. The results show that the dynamic spectrum sharing in the 5.9-GHz band can significantly raise the performance of Wi-Fi network without excessively degrading the DSRC system, and especially the Cisco's proposal prefers to protect the DSRC profit while the Qualcomm's draft favors Wi-Fi exclusively. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.