Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) has been designed to support vehicular communications. In the U.S., DSRC operates in the 5.9 GHz licensed spectrum band. Its physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers, defined in the IEEE 802.11p standard, are based on the IEEE 802.11 family of Wi-Fi standards. Vehicular communication environments differ significantly from the sparse and low-velocity nomadic use cases of a typical Wi-Fi deployment. Thus, there are many challenges to adapt Wi-Fi technologies to support the unique requirements of vehicular communications such as achieving high and reliable performance in highly mobile, often densely populated, and frequently non-line-of-sight environments. The automotive and the communications industries, academia, and governments around the world have been devoting tremendous efforts to address these challenges, and significant achievements have been made. Remaining challenges can be addressed by the future versions of DSRC. In this paper, we investigate the current technologies used by DSRC to support vehicle safety communications, analyze existing and possible DSRC performance enhancements that can be realized in the near term, and provide a few initial thoughts on the DSRC evolution path.

Vehicular networks require secure communication, especially for safety applications. A public key infrastructure using a Combinatorial Certificate Scheme was implemented in the US Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) Proof-of- Concept (PoC) trial to secure V2V communication and preserve vehicle privacy. This paper analyzes the privacy and scalability of the Combinatorial Certificate approach for a nationwide network of 200 million vehicles. It examines the tradeoffs between privacy, the ability to efficiently detect and remove bad actors, and the need to minimize the impact on innocent vehicles due to revocation and replacement of compromised shared certificates. Key findings include the level of vehicle anonymity that exists in situations of low vehicular density and the impact that certificate revocations have on innocent vehicles. A refinement to the Combinatorial Certificate Scheme is described that improves the innocent vehicle re-key quota lifetime by an order of magnitude.

Overhead power control parameters in CDMA and W-CDMA networks can be used to shift load from congested cells to cells with available capacity. This improves traffic distribution and network efficiency. Trial results demonstrated a marked improvement in RF network performance and carrying capacity.