The Impact of Redundancy on DSRC Safety Application Reliability under Different Data Rates

This research addresses reliability issues of safety applications in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that use Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) in Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) systems. Reliability of such applications is affected not only by the usual environmental effects of wireless communication, but also potentially by malicious act. The case of constant and random jamming and their impact on safety applications are investigated under consideration of the data rates used. It is shown that the most important message, the Basic Safety Message (BSM), which is transmitted on a dedicated safety channel can be jammed, resulting in safety application failure. To mitigate against jamming a communication scheme based on redundant channel is used that utilizes channels with higher power ratings for communicating data with BSM-equivalent content, while not deviating from existing standards. The impact of channel and message redundancy for different data rates is investigated. Considering the two jammer types, it is shown that the introduction of redundancy overcomes the impact of jamming attacks. Furthermore it is demonstrated that application reliability increases inverse to the data rates of the channels. Analysis shows that DSRC safety applications that use redundant communication can overcome jamming attacks if data rates of 3Mbps and 6Mbps are used, while 12Mbps communication is not advisable.