Survey of Spectrum Regulation for Intelligent Transportation Systems

As 5G communication technology develops, vehicular communications that require high reliability, low latency, and massive connectivity are drawing increasing interest from those in academia and industry. Due to these developing technologies, vehicular communication is not limited to vehicle components in the forms of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) or Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) networks, but has also been extended to connect with others, such as pedestrians and cellular users. Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) is the conventional vehicular communication standard for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). More recently, the 3
^rd
Generation Partnership Project introduced Cellular-Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X), a competitor to DSRC. Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to consider deploying Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (U-NII) devices in the ITS band with two interference mitigation approaches: Detect-and-Vacate (DAV) and Re-channelization (Re-CH). With multiple standard options and interference mitigation approaches, numerous regulatory taxonomies can be identified and notification of relevant technical challenges issued. However, these challenges are much broader than the current and future regulatory taxonomies pursued by the different countries involved. Because their plans differ, the technical and regulatory challenges vary. This article presents a literature survey about the technical challenges, the current and future ITS band usage plans, and the major research testbeds for the U.S., Europe, China, Korea, and Japan. This survey shows that the most likely deployment taxonomies are (1) DSRC, C-V2X, and Wi-Fi with Re-CH; (2) DSRC and C-V2X with interoperation, and (3) C-V2X only. The most difficult technical challenge is the interoperability between the Wi-Fi-like DSRC and 4G LTE-like C-V2X.