Performance Evaluation of V2V and V2R

Communication Based on 2-Wavelength

Cognitive Wireless Network on Road State
Information GIS Platform

Akira Sakuraba1, Yoshitaka Shibata1(&), Goshi Sato2,

and Noriki Uchida3
1
Iwate Prefectural University, Takizawa, Japan
{a_saku,shibata}@iwate-pu.ac.jp
2
Resilient ICT Research Center, Sendai, Japan
sato_g@nict.go.jp
3
Fukuoka Institute Technology, Fukuoka, Japan
n-uchida@fit.ac.jp

Abstract. In this paper, performance evaluation of V2V and V2I communi-

cation introduces cognitive wireless communication method which is designed
for exchanging of road sensing information between the vehicle and vehicle and
roadside server system for gathering and sharing road state information. N-
wavelength wireless cognitive network method is applied to improve the net-
work performance over the conventional wireless network. In our system, as
basic control link, 920 MHz and 2.4 GHz and 5.6 GHz bands as data link are
used. By combining those wireless links, both long distance and highspeed data
transmission are attained at the same time. The prototype system of road state
information system is constructed to evaluate and compare the network per-
formance with the conventional single wireless network.

1 Introduction

Mobility is one of the most important means for economic activity to safely and
reliably carry persons, loads, feeds and other materials around world. So far, huge
number of manual operated cars are produced and their quality and cost performance
are improved year and year. Then, self-driving cars have been emerged and running on
highways and major public streets on which are well maintained with ideal conditions,
such as wide, flat road surface and clear visible center lines in urban area.
On the other hand, in winter season of cold weather countries such as Northern
Japan, Northern America and Europe, most of the road surfaces are occupied with
heavy snow and iced surface and many slip accidents occurred even though the
vehicles attach anti-slip tires. In fact almost more 90% of traffic accidents in northern
part of Japan is caused from slipping car on snowy or iced roads.
This could be challenge for realizing high-level autonomous vehicle such as SAE 5
[1] and even for today’s manual driving vehicle.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

L. Barolli et al. (Eds.): INCoS 2019, AISC 1035, pp. 212–222, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29035-1_21
 Performance Evaluation of V2V and V2R Communication 213

In those cases, traffic accidents are rapidly increased. Therefore, safer and more
reliable road monitoring and warning system which can quickly transmit the road
condition information to drivers and new self-driving method before passing through
the dangerous road area is indispensable. Furthermore, the information and commu-
nication environment in local or mountain areas, is not well developed and their mobile
and wireless communication facilities are unstable along the roads compared with
urban area. Thus, once a traffic accident or disaster occurred, information collection,
transmission and sharing are delayed or even cannot be made. Eventually the resident’s
lives and reliabilities cannot be maintained. More robust and resilient information
infrastructure and proper and quick information services with road environmental
conditions are indispensable.
In order to resolve those problems, various road sensing methods are possible to
understand forward road surface condition with various environmental sensors. For
example, dynamics sensor such as accelerometer is a popular equipment to determine
road surface condition in civil engineering. This type of method collects oscillation of
the probe vehicle body with onboard dynamics sensors. However, these sensing
methods is designed for offline processing to analyze and determine the road state
condition after the probe vehicle has completed the recording of road sensing data.
Therefore, more realtime based sensor data processing and sharing with other vehicles
is indispensable.
In this work, we propose a the system to deliver road state information and onboard
sensor data between vehicles which is conducted by vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) network,
and between vehicle and roadside unit (RSU) which is delivered over vehicle-to-road
(V2R) communication. Both wireless communications can be configured without any
public wireless network. Our communication system consists of cognitive wireless
network by organized multiple wavelength wireless networks, so called N-wavelength
wireless cognitive network and can select the best wave-length link to deliver data
depending on the network condition and types of data.
We focus to describe V2V and V2R wireless communication methods and their
performance evaluation on field experiment in actual public road and vehicle when for
the speed of vehicle is varied. Though the field experiment, we could conduct the result
that our proposed method has reasonable performance to exchange road state infor-
mation in actual road environment.

2 Related Works

As advent of road state sensing and mobility network technologies, autonomous as well
as connected vehicles have been developed toward the realization of safer and more
reliable automotive world. The sensor data from various sensor devices installed on
vehicle are collected on own vehicle and analyzed to determine the road state quali-
tatively or quantitatively.
There are several methods which have been introduced in field of pavement
engineering with non-contact onboard sensor to collect pavement condition while
probing vehicle is running. In those methods, dynamics sensors especially acceleration
sensor is one of typical sensors to obtain road condition such as pothole or bump of
214 A. Sakuraba et al.

pavement. Du et al. proposed a measurement method to estimate the International

Roughness Index (IRI) using Z-axis acceleration sensor [2]. Casselgren et al. intro-
duced a road surface condition determination method using near infrared (NIR) sensor
[3]. This method uses three different wavelengths of NIR laser sensors to determine the
paved road condition into dry, wet, icy, and snowy states.
Floating car data (FCD) is a vehicular telemetry method which provides to collect
status of the remote place such as road traffic flow. This system uses public wireless
network such 3G/3.5G/4G cellular network for data delivering. On the other hand,
CarTel [4] realizes V2R communication on private wireless network which is short-
range vehicular adhoc network (VANET) based on 802.11b WLAN. Using this
wireless network, about 30 KiB/s as end-to-end throughput from a vehicle to Internet
can be attained.
There are also other VANET based on Dedicated Short Range Communication
(DSRC) or 802.11p, and 802.11a/b/g/n for the popular wireless standard for V2V and
V2R communication. WAVE system [5] is a prototype of DSRC operated on 5.8 GHz
band and designed to notify traffic signs for drivers with V2R communication. Road
Side Units (RSUs) which is equipped as the improved DSRC based wireless device are
now in operation at actual highway of Japan.
V2V applications especially require shorter latency and less packet loss ratio on in
addition to high efficiency data delivering on wireless communication. There are
several implementations of cognitive radio for V2X communication which consists of
multiple wireless links and switches depending on communication requirement. Ito
et al. developed 2-wavelength wireless communication consists of 920 MHz band
LoRa and 2.4 GHz band with 802.11b/g/n WLAN device to reduce latency which is
caused by authentication and association processes before data delivering on WLAN
band. They confirmed that the system allowed to increase amount of data delivering
between the vehicle and the RSU [6].
In our research, end-to-end performance in terms of communication distance and
total data delivery rate between the V2V and V2R are investigated.

3 V2V and V2R Communication Server System

In Fig. 1 shows V2R communication method between the Smart Mobile

Box (SMB) which is a communication server system of a vehicle and the Smart Relay
Station (SRS) of road side server. First, one of the wireless networks with the longest
communication distance can first make connection link between SMB and SRS using
SDN function. Through the this connection link, the communication control data of
other wireless networks such as UUID, security key, password, authentication, IP
address, TCP port number, socket No. are exchanged [7–9]. As approaching each
other, the second wireless network among the cognitive network can be connected in a
short time and actual data transmission can be immediately started. This transmission
process can be repeated during crossing each other as long as the longest communi-
cation link is connected. This communication process between SMB and SRS is the
same as the communication between SMB to other SMB except for using adhoc mode.
 Performance Evaluation of V2V and V2R Communication 215

Fig. 1. V2R communication method between the SMBS and SRS

On the other hand, in the V2x communication between vehicle and the global cloud
server on Internet, the sensor data from SMB is transmitted to the SRS in road side
server. Then those data are sent to the gateway function unit and the address of those
data from local to global address and sent to the global cloud server through Internet.
Thus, using the proposed V2X communication protocol, not only Intranet communi-
cation among the vehicle network, but also Intranet and Internet communication can be
realized.

4 Cognitive Wireless Network

Our proposed system has cognitive wireless network in order to perform data deliv-
ering with the best network throughput. The system consists of multiple network
devices which have different wavelength wireless links. In implementation at this time,
we install three different wireless standard based devices which is composed of
2.4/5.6 GHz band WLAN and 920 MHz band LPWA. We expect that system will be
able to provide better throughput for application by link selection which corresponds to
type of data/information.
2.4 GHz Band WLAN. 802.11b/g/n is the most popular wireless standard and used in
many field today, as well as VANET platform. 2.4 GHz band is a license-free band
both indoor and outdoor, and also allows to provide adhoc networking easily. How-
ever, as this wireless band would be encountered with terrible interference due to
carriers of other traffics, therefore 2.4 GHz band has concerned of system could not
expect much performance especially in urban area. In current implementation, we
designed the system to deliver road state information over 2.4 GHz WLAN which
could be composed of less amount of data.
5.6 GHz Band WLAN. We assumed that 5.6 GHz band is based on 802.11ac wave 2
standard, as primary data transmission link for exchange road surface states and raw
sensor data. 802.11ac wave 2 standard has capability for higher throughput compared
216 A. Sakuraba et al.

with existing 2.4 or 5 GHz WLAN standard, by multi-user multiple-input and multiple-
output (MU-MIMO) and channel bonding. MU-MIMO can deal multiple vehicle
communication at once without network performance degradation. Another charac-
teristics is beamforming technology, it can extend longer distance wireless commu-
nication with high throughput. Both characteristics are could be expected to provide
higher throughput even in longer range, it helps reliable and massive data transmission
while vehicle is moving faster. Our system uses 5.6 GHz band WLAN as the primary
link which delivers massive amount of data such raw sensor value or images of
onboard RGB sensor etc.
920 MHz Band LPWA. 920 MHz band wireless network, as known as LoRa or
LPWA, is one of license-free long distance radio communication technology. Network
performance of this type wireless technology is designed to perform several tens of kilo
bps throughput with several kilometers range distance, it is difficult to transmit large
amount of data as primary data transmission link but it is suitable to utilize it as
controlling message link. We designed our system which has common control channel
among SRSs and SMBs on LPWA long distance wireless network. This is a reason that
typical authentication of WLAN such Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) requires to
connect in several to several dozen seconds, vehicle easily moves to out of wireless
LAN coverage area while SMB is attempting to authenticate. This method could
increase amount of transmittable data than conventional single wavelength WLAN
configuration.

5 Data Transmission Flow in 2-Wavelength Network

Figure 2 describes data transmission while V2R and V2 V communication using 2-

wavelength network devices from initiation to be connected to WLAN.

(a) (b)

Fig. 2. (a) Message & data flow in V2R (b) Message & data flow in V2V
 Performance Evaluation of V2V and V2R Communication 217

Messaging flow of V2R scenario is illustrated as Fig. 2a. Initially, SRS broadcasts
own existence information via 920 MHz band, which corresponds to beacon frame of
access point in 802.11 based WLAN. This information includes traffic direction which
SRS collects and provides road states. When running vehicle receives broadcast
message from SRS which is installed in the same traffic direction as the vehicle is
moving, SMB responses to SRS with own node ID. Responding to that, SRS assigns an
IP address for WLAN on SMB and then deliver WLAN network information for SMB.
These information is composed of assigned IP address, netmask, default gateway
address, ESSID of access point, WPA passphrase etc. due to SRS requests SMB to
connect Infrastructure Mode in V2R communication. SMB activates WLAN device
after connection information has been received and waits for vehicle is in range of
WLAN of SRS. When the vehicle entered into WLAN coverage area, SMB attempts to
take 4-way handshake for WLAN connection. If WPA authentication has been suc-
ceeded, it also checks for continuity by ICMP message exchanging. At this point
WLAN connection has been established completely, thus both vehicle and SRS are
able to exchange road state information over TCP each other.
Figure 2b denotes message flow which describes V2V communication from initi-
ation to be established. Message and data flow is very similar procedures, firstly
destination vehicle which requires road state information from other vehicle, waits
broadcasts own existence information from source vehicle which has already road state
information, via 920 MHz band. If SMB on destination vehicle received broadcast
message, sends node ID in response. In V2V communication, source vehicle answers
IP address related information, ESSID, and wireless-key to destination vehicle. After
destination vehicle received these information, it activates WLAN adapter and attempts
to connect in adhoc mode on WLAN until both vehicles in range of it. After WLAN
connection has been established, destination vehicle measures for continuity, finally
road condition exchange will be taken over TCP in adhoc mode between both vehicles
if continuity test has been passed.

6 Prototype and Performance Evaluation

6.1 Prototype System
In order to verify the effects of our proposed system, we built prototype system based
on three-wavelength wireless communication device which uses Buffalo UI-U2-300D
for 802.11b/g/n WLAN USB device, Planex communication GW-900D USB WLAN
adapter for 802.11ac WLAN, and Oi Electric OiNET-923 for 920 MHz LWPA
wireless network as shown in Fig. 3. Those devices are connected to organize a SMB.
SRS also has the similar configuration except for Ruckus Wireless Zoneflex T300
access point for 802.11ac WLAN capable device instead of GW-900D. Controlling
both SMB and SRS is based on AMD64 architecture desktop system. We implemented
them on Intel NUC Kit NUC5i5RYH barebone PC kit with Ubuntu 16.04 Linux
system. Application programs on both SRS and SMB are written by C, Ruby, and Bash
Script.
218 A. Sakuraba et al.

Fig. 3. Device connection and configuration of experimental setting on SRS and SMB

We have experimented a prototype system to evaluate performance our method on

actual vehicle on V2R and V2V communications. First, we evaluated V2R commu-
nication method between the SMB on vehicle and the SRS on road side server as
shown in Fig. 4. For each case, we set two scenarios to measure performance difference
which is caused by the moving direction of vehicle. The first scenario requires vehicle
to move to eastbound or westbound direction as be described in Fig. 4. Vehicle moves
at 20–50 km/h constant speed on either direction of the road. We installed both
2.4 GHz and 5.6 GHz band WLAN unit on the top of left side view mirror on the
vehicle and 920 MHz band LoRa at the roof of the vehicle.

Fig. 4. Overview of V2R communication

On the other hand, Fig. 4 illustrates outline of evaluation for V2V communication
which consists of the same 920 MHz band LPWA and 2.4 GHz band WLAN as the
V2R communication in actual road environment. In both communications, we
observed performance using TCP based networking tool on WLAN conducted by
onboard SMBs which are placed on two vehicles moving to another direction (Fig. 5).
 Performance Evaluation of V2V and V2R Communication 219

Fig. 5. Overview of both vehicle direction trials and installation of SMB wireless units

As measurement data, several types of network states which includes received

signal strength Indicator (RSSI) on each wireless links, the communication completion
time to connect WLAN from system initiation, effective throughput and communica-
tion distance and total amount of delivered data. In the experiment, we ran at least 5
trials for each vehicle speed from 20–50 km/h and averaged the results to reduce the
signal noise and interference on the measurement.

6.2 Performance Results on V2R Communication

Figures 6, 7, 8 and 9 indicates averaged RSSI and averaged throughput of WLAN link
which is both plotted in every second. The result recorded as of the time after the link
established. The result is separately plotted in each running speeds. We have observed
that succeeded rate of TCP connection establishing was almost 100% of whole
scenarios.
These graphs denote that both the peak value of RSSI and throughput appeared at
earlier elapsed time as the running speed of vehicle increases. Generically, since RSSI
has a strong correlation with throughput, this result is reasonable.
Throughput on TCP traffic was affected by the running speed of vehicle. The result
shows that Data transmission was available in 80 s after connection establishing when
the vehicle was moving at 20 km/h. As increasing running speed of the vehicle from
20 km/h, the data transmission period decreased by 40 s at 50 km/h. The peak of
throughput was not drastically changed by varying vehicle’s velocity.

6.3 Performance Results on V2V Communication

Figures 10, 11, 12 and 13 indicate the averaged RSSI and averaged throughput of
WLAN link which are both plotted in every second after the after the link was
established. The result is separately plotted for each running speed. We have observed
that succeeded rate of TCP connection establishing was 92.5% of whole scenarios.
These graphs denote that both the peak value of RSSI and throughput appeared at
earlier elapsed time as the running speed increased. Generically, RSSI has a strong
correlation with throughput, we could confirm that this result was quite reasonable.
220 A. Sakuraba et al.

Fig. 6. 20 km/h Fig. 7. 30 km/h

Fig. 8. 40 km/h Fig. 9. 50 km/h

Throughput on TCP traffic was affected by running speed. The result shows that
possible data transmission period was 38 s after connection establishing when the
vehicle was moving at 20 km/h and decreased by 15 s at 50 km/h. The peak value of
throughput was not drastically changed even though varying vehicle’s running speed.

7 Discussions

Surprisingly the result shows that the system has some capability for realistic vehicle
velocity up to 50 km/h which is possible in actual road traffic. However, total delivered
data amount was varied even the same condition by environmental factors, such as
terrain, existing of oncoming or overtaking vehicle, or distance of the following
vehicle, etc. Especially, terrain of the road influents line-of-sight (LOS) or difference
height of Tx/Rx antenna on the vehicle which is occurred by terrain, therefore these
factors could make significant effects to RSSI. Thus we should consider the position of
WLAN antenna on the vehicle.
In higher vehicle velocity scenario, our prototype recorded higher RSSI after
connection establishing. We can analyze this result is caused with distance between
vehicle was closer while WLAN adapter is establishing with 4-way handshake, the
 Performance Evaluation of V2V and V2R Communication 221

Fig. 10. 20 km/h Fig. 11. 30 km/h

Fig. 12. 40 km/h Fig. 13. 50 km/h

distance when it completed to establishing would be shorter than slower velocity

scenario. To obtain much amount data with exchanging over V2V communication, we
should implement a new WLAN connection procedure which conducts shorter time
compared with conventional method, for instance Fast Initial Link Setup (FILS) which
is standardized as IEEE 802.11ai [8], it could realize as one of solution for it.

8 Conclusion

In this paper, we proposed a V2V and V2R Communication method based on 2-

wavelength cognitive wireless network for exchanging the road state information. This
system has three of fundamental functions; observing of physical state of road surface
by multiple sensors on the vehicle, analyzing those sensor output for decision of road
surface conditions, and transmitting the calculated road condition to roadside device or
other vehicle to share the road condition information on which the oncoming vehicle
travelled until now. Design of our communication system utilizes cognitive wireless
network which consists of WLAN for data delivering and LPWA as the control
message link.
222 A. Sakuraba et al.

We have evaluated our proposed cognitive wireless system for V2V and V2R on
actual road environment. The evaluation results indicated that the system has enough
capability for delivering road state information over V2V and V2R communication
even vehicles are moving in realistic speed on the actual public road. We could also
confirm that our system can work in the challenged network environment where public
communication networks such as 3G and LTE are not available in rural or mountainous
area roads.
As our future work, we will implement the actual data delivering application which
is used in the inter-urban highway. We are also planning to carry out the social
experiment by collaborating with bus operation company for road state sharing system
using improved prototype.

Acknowledgments. This research was supported by Strategic Information and Communications

R&D Promotion Program (SCOPE) No. 181502003, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Commu-
nications, Japan.

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