Infrastructure-to-Vehicle Throughput in TVWS for Urban and Rural Environments

Currently, TV whitespace is being considered by WLAN standards, namely the IEEE 802.11af or WhiteFi for enhanced coverage and access to additional bandwidth. The TV bands are harmonised worldwide and the white space is expected to be available globally, making it suitable for vehicular communications. This paper utilises a state-of-the-art 3D ray tracing tool, where road routes are defined in an urban and a rural environment to model realistic infrastructure-to-vehicle propagation in different scenarios. Based on the propagation analysis and link adaptation of SISO, STBC 2x2 and SM 2x2 schemes, the paper compares the coverage and throughput performance of WhiteFi against the legacy WiFi system. Results indicate that WhiteFi has better propagation characteristics than WiFi due to its lower operating frequency. Besides that, it is also shown that the performance of MIMO is critically dependent on the availability of independent spatial channels. Therefore, the full benefits of MIMO cannot be exploited in highly correlated channels especially in a rural scenario.