Evaluation of DSRC/Wi-Fi Hybrid Communications for Intelligent Transport Systems

Penetration of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) applications is slow, particularly in developing countries, mainly due to the costs associated with the two state-of-the-art technologies, Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) and Cellular-V2x (c-V2x).As a solution, this paper presents a DSRC/Wi-Fi hybrid system and evaluates its performance experimentally. Communication within the Wi-Fi segment is via customized beacons serving a similar function as roadside alerts in DSRC, but with a configurable repetition interval. The results show that Wi-Fi beacons can be received over a 200m range with a packet delivery rate of more than 50%. Considering the effective range and the information update rate, we illustrate several applications that are feasible with the hybrid system in Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Infrastructure-to-Vehicle (I2V) modes. With our novel hardware design, the expected functionality can be achieved with Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) Wi-Fi components in a cost-effective manner.