TV White Space Enabled Connected Vehicle Networks: Challenges and Solutions

Connected vehicle technology provides many potential benefits on the road such as safety applications, effective traffic management, and mobile Internet access. In order to mitigate the resulting high spectrum demands and provide vehicular connectivity with wider communication range, higher transmission rate, and lower data transfer cost, in this article, we exploit the abundant TV white space with superior propagation characteristics and building penetration performance. We first present the application scenarios exploiting TV white space in heterogeneous connected vehicular communication networks, and discuss white space channel availability and characteristics for vehicular communications. We then propose TV white space geolocation database based vehicular communication architectures for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. Finally, we highlight the key technical challenges and pinpoint future research directions toward exploiting TV white space for vehicular communication networks.